Here’s a solution to the baby formula crisis.
Here’s my solution to the formula shortage: Men should breastfeed. Sure, it will take dedication and hard work, also industrial-strength estrogen and other meds, a doctor, a lactation consultant, and I don’t know what else; but if a handful of trans women can do it, I’m sure regular old cis men can figure it out. Headline: “Breast Hero Dad: ‘I Begged Her Not to Use Formula, but She Wouldn’t Listen!’”
Apparently, some women can restart lactation after breastfeeding has ceased, so mothers who breastfed their babies and want to shame formula users to justify their own exhaustion, sore nipples, mastitis, lost work, restricted diets, and forgone medications can also step in. Breastfeeding isn’t just about milk, after all. It’s also about making other women feel like guilty failures. All babies matter! I had my daughter 35 years ago, back in the days of the Mommy Wars. I can’t believe we are still blaming mothers who don’t breastfeed—or don’t breastfeed exclusively, or for long enough, or with a sufficiently beatific smile plastered permanently on their face. I enjoyed breastfeeding, by the way—many women do—but it was easy for me physically after the first few weeks, and I was working at home. (I drank Guinness, too, which was thought in those benighted times to help with the milk supply, but today is just another item in the ever-increasing list of things breastfeeding mothers must forsake.) If it had been difficult—if I had been going to an office every day and had to pump, if every feed had been a struggle or I had suffered any of the physical, emotional, or daily-life problems that outraged women are revealing just now in our nation’s op-ed pages—I doubt I would have kept up with it. I had plenty of friends who bottle-fed exclusively and doubted the extravagant claims made for breast milk in countries like ours with clean water and sanitation. I was formula-fed myself, like most baby boomers, and we are (mostly) healthy and smart and have accomplished great things in our time, including parenting and grandparenting most Americans now alive.
