I realize I've been blogging more about a suburban house and impending motherhood than anything musical recently, but hey, this is all novel and exciting to me, so this is what I blog about.

At my mother's urging, I attended a La Leche League meeting today. It was really fun, and not just because of Bob's wisecracks about lechery afterwards. For one, there was all this extremely concentrated cuteness in the room, so it hardly mattered what people were saying. Two, people, at least the ones who could talk, were saying interesting things. The advice fell into two categories: "Just trust yourself and your baby to know what to do, and everything will work out" and "Don't be afraid to ask for help when things go terribly wrong, because there's nothing easy or automatic about nursing." Interestingly, most of the "when things inevitably go wrong" advice seemed to come from women who'd had the more medical type of birth, such as cesarians. I figure it's like this: A newborn baby is only as smart as it has to be. Its job is to nurse, and it's usually born with just enough brain power to figure out how to do that, and no more. (OK, our particular baby will be so brilliant, the moment it's born, it will relate its idea of how to fix the US economy, but I'm talking about the average baby here.) If its squishy little brain gets befuddled with some cocktail of drugs, as it usually is in a hospital delivery, it loses its ability to do even its very simple job. I've read statistics about this, but hearing actual stories from actual people made the statistics seem that much more real. The people selling you these painkilling drugs in the hospital never tell you about the studies showing the side effects these drugs have on the baby. I don't like pain, but I'd rather feel pain and have a healthy baby than feel numb and have a befuddled baby.

This is all making me even happier I decided on a home birth (with hospital backup in the rare event I actually need it.) Now that I have a bit of distance between me and my old midwifery practice, I'm seeing even more problems with them. Like, when I first became their patient, they handed me this sheaf of pamphlets and stuff to read. It included information and coupons from a couple of different formula companies, but no information at all about breastfeeding. That's kind of like going to a cardiologist and getting coupons for donuts but no information about vegetables.

The proof showing that breastfeeding is best is so completely clear and obvious to anyone who looks at it, it's outrageous that the other midwifery office didn't mention it, but instead promoted formula feeding. Formula companies have the money to influence medical practices, while there's no money to be made off mothers' milk. Here I'd thought that this sort of thing was mainly a problem with drug company reps visiting doctors' offices to give them gifts and talk up the latest expensive drug, but it's apparently the practice of formula companies too.

At the La Leche League meeting, the leader ripped a poster off the wall and talked about it a bit. This poster was paid for by a formula company, and it was supposedly promoting breastfeeding, probably as a result of some legal settlement that required it to do so. It basically said, "You can reduce your baby's chance of getting an ear infection by 50% if you submit to the degrading practice of letting the dirty little parasite suck on your tender bits instead of feeding it formula like a normal person." OK, that's a paraphrase, but that was the basic idea. A simpler phrase would have been, "If you give us a couple of thousand dollars a year, we will double your child's chance of getting an ear infection."

It's really quite odd how all these things are phrased. Like some study showed that breastfed babies grow up to be kids that have IQs that average 8 points higher than formula-fed babies. 8 freaking points! (And this is normal, cow's milk-based formula, not melamine-enriched.) But this data is usually presented as if these breastfed babies had IQs that were higher than those of "normal" babies. The proper way to present this data would be to say that formula lowers a kid's IQ to 8 points below normal. If some company were to try to market sugar-frosted lead paint chips that were known to permanently lower kids' IQs by 8 points, people would be up in arms, and the FDA would ban them. OK, maybe they wouldn't, because people are really stupid. Now we know why. But formula is such an entrenched business, no one can touch it.

It just occurred to me that babies who drink cows'-milk-based formula, while their IQs are lower than those of normal babies, do have IQs that are higher than those of cows. It kind of makes you wonder how smart cows would be if we raised them on human milk. I don't plan to do this experiment myself, but I'm putting the idea out there for any scientists who are looking for a project.