“The worldwide ‘Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative‘ is a great campaign — get the baby skin-to-skin with mom first thing after birth, leave them be for an hour to start nursing, and basically phase out the nursery. A centerpiece of the initiative is to ban formula companies from giving out free samples in maternity wards. But perhaps calling it ‘baby friendly’ was a bad idea. Perhaps it sends the message that breastfeeding is somehow not ‘mother friendly.’

That’s essentially what Hannah Rosin argues in an article in this month’s Atlantic, ‘The Case Against Breastfeeding’…”

[Read more and add your $.02 on Babble.com]

Optimal childbirth leads to optimal conditions for breastfeeding (which provides optimal nutrition and immunity for newborns): babies who are born awake and alert, who didn’t have a suction tube put down their throat, who were not induced or scheduled and therefore are breathing with lungs that are fully mature, whose lungs reaped the physiological benefits of vaginal birth, who get immediate skin-to-skin contact with their mother, who are not routinely separated from their mother, and who are born to mothers in relatively good shape (i.e. not recovering from surgery) — these mother-baby pairs are more likely to breastfeed, and breastfeed exclusively. They’re also more likely to breastfeed if their hospital doesn’t give out pacifiers, supplement with formula, or send mom home with freebie formula samples.

But according to a first-of-its-kind survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of U.S. hospitals are failing. Nearly 2,700 hospitals and birth centers were surveyed on labor & delivery care, postpartum care, and follow-up care. Hospitals received a mean score of 62 – that would be an ‘F’ in grade school — and birth centers came away with a solid ‘B,’ at 86.

“The findings indicate substantial prevalences of maternity practices that are not evidence-based and are known to interfere with breastfeeding,” says the CDC.

• Nearly one-quarter (24%) of birth facilities reported supplementing the majority of healthy, full-term, breastfed newborns with “something other than breast milk…a practice shown to be unnecessary and detrimental to breastfeeding.”
• 65% told mothers to limit the duration of suckling
• 45% gave pacifiers to the majority of infants
• 70% gave breastfeeding moms “gift bags” with formula samples.

The CDC concludes: “Facilities should consider discontinuing these practices to provide more positive influences on both breastfeeding initiation and duration.” Read the full report here. Want to know more about breastfeeding? Pop into the Breastfeeding Cafe.

As we learn from gender scholar Louise Marie Roth in this Huffington Post blog, political moderator Bill Maher has apparently come out as being “Lactate Intolerant.” On a recent episode of Real Time he defended an Applebee’s restaurant for booting a woman who was nursing her babe at the dinner table. I didn’t see Maher’s show, but I read about this “new rule” of his on HBO’s web site. Perhaps he is winking just a little (he is a comedian, after all) when he chides “lactivists” who argue breastfeeding as a human right:

“It’s not fighting for a right. It’s fighting for the spotlight you surely will get when you go all ‘Janet Jackson’ on everyone. And get to drink in the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the other customers because ‘You made a baby,’ Something a dog can do.”

But I think Maher is being serious when he says, “But this isn’t really about women taking their breasts out in public, as much as I’d like it to be. It’s about how petty and parochial our causes have become, how activism has become narcissism.”

Breastfeeding is considered nothing less than the most important intervention for newborn survival. And we call this petty? Parochial?

Women are called selfish if they don’t breastfeed, and now selfish if they do…

Yes, supposedly the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hopes you just about lactate when you see this ad, but I can’t decide if it makes me want to go for a hike or reach for an allergy pill. The Washington Post explains: this is a “toned down” version of a public health ad campaign that was initially designed to encourage breastfeeding by making clear that formula has serious health risks.

The original HHS ads, like the inhaler one to the right, were designed just like campaigns against smoking and drunk driving — highlighting the dangers of not following the recommendation — and were visually arresting. (Another scrapped ad features an insulin vial topped with a rubber nipple to represent the increased risk of diabetes. See it here).

Naturally, the formula lobby didn’t take kindly to the negative publicity, hired a few political big wigs to lobby against it (including the former chair of the Republican National Committee), made a few phone calls (one was to the American Academy of Pediatrics), and poof, we get dandelions.

Meanwhile, a recent review of the medical literature by the U.S.’s own Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that breastfed infants have “fewer ear and gastrointestinal infections, as well as lower rates of diabetes, leukemia, obesity, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome.” Yet health officials were told by the powers that be to downplay the report.

The Post did a bang up job with this story — read the full article here if you haven’t already.