Yeah I fucking love it when la leche league emotionally blackmails a mother that can't nurse because they work in a shitty job or can't get the baby to latch even with a nursing specialist helping them and they break down in big ugly post partum sobs in my office.
It's so great. It's so fucking great. Even though if there IS a difference in babies that are breast vs bottle fed, it's so fucking small it has no clinical significance whatsoever.
Baby formula should be free and available in unlimited quantities from any grocery store, no questions asked, fight me America
Complex policies are just a form of deterrence
And on top of that they stigmatize the fuck out of government services typically, too
Do you have any idea how maddening this is?
You’re a parent of a newborn and have breasts full of milk. For whatever reason, the child just cannot latch no matter what you try and ends up just biting you for hours out of desperation and you deal with it because it’s their only source of food. But all that milk is just in there and to get out you have to massage it all out in the shower so you’re not in constant physical pain.
Your baby is now losing weight instead of gaining, so all the lost sleep and nearly constant 24-7 feeding is still not enough. Your doctor will at this point finally stop pushing breastfeeding and insist on formula. They finally get you set up with the right formula through WIC so your baby’s gaining weight.
Except now you’ve gotta memorize this list of which baby foods will and won’t be covered and if you get it wrong or your particular cashier just interprets the rule differently then every single item they question is a reminder that, for whatever reason, you can’t breastfeed and almost starved your baby in the process of trying to. As if needing to line up brightly colored paper checks with WIC in giant letters that have to be punched in by hand instead of scanned wasn’t embarrassing enough as you hold up the entire line to be like 7 things. Now you’ve got this extra thing in the back of your head nagging you as you have to put baby food back that you qualified for last month.
And complaining about any of this will get you flooded with suggestions for how to breastfeed better. As if you just weren’t trying hard enough. Or how to plan ahead which items are covered. As if you just weren’t reading them hard enough or shopping smartly enough. No one knows what you went through or how your tortured yourself over this when formula would have been fine from the get go.
This is fucking insanity. I cannot see how this policy was written by anyone other than men who don't have kids. I take that back, I can see some clueless bougie white women thinking this is good because "everyone should breastfeed".
First off, a ton of mothers desperately want to breastfeed but can't for a number of reasons. And a lot of them sadly feel like shit about it - something totally beyond their control. So fuck them, I guess. Good job Dems.
Secondly, breastfeeding is really hard to do if you have to work a job, much less two or three. Sure, some marketing manager can close the door to her office and pump. But how many women cleaning hotel rooms you think have bosses who will allow them to take some time to do that? Of course if we lived in an actually kinda good country like the former East Germany or USSR, moms can stay home with the babies for a year or two and actually breastfeed if they and their kid is physically able. But that's SCARYYYY SOCIALISM so we can't do that. Hell, in most US states you get ZERO paid maternity leave. Had we lived in my home state when our kid was born, my partner would have been back to work 2 weeks post partum while the c-section scars were still healing.
God damn America... :amerikkka:
Ok, now I understand why Pete Buttigieg is rising to power. It's clear to me now. They just adopted a baby.
I think packages are given out at state/local workshops/support groups for new mothers, kinda thing where you would go to learn basic stuff about child-care and they might give out some breast pumps, diapers, etc. Probably you take a survey or talk to a case worker about your child feeding routine then they give out a package based on their guidelines. So yea you could lie, but practically i dont think most people would realize that they might want to.
That's almost more frustrating, if people don't realize they're incentivized to lie then they also aren't being incentivized to do the thing the incentive should promote.
It's not just evil, it's also pointless
The fun of modern bureaucracy is that they're so worried about people "lying" to meet these ridiculous standards that they spend as much policing their participants as they do funding the actual programs. That, and the endless volume of bureaucracy dumped on the backs of participants make the programs themselves largely inaccessible.
the most absurd thing about means testing is that it is
conceivedframed as a way to prevent excess government spending, even though IT COSTS MORE FUCKING MONEY TO CREATE, STAFF AND MAINTAIN A BOX-TICKING BUREAUCRACY POINTLESSLY DEDICATED TO GATEKEEPING WELFARE :marx-angry:also the US government quite literally has currency sovereignty and can spend as much as it needs on anything it sets its mind to so long as it maintains hyperinflation through an increased tax burden, so the very idea of the government "spending too much money" is a joke. :marx-joker:
a 2-trillion-with-a-T-dollar war in a country that didn't attack us: nobody asks how we're going to pay for it
house the homeless: everyone asks how we're going to pay for it
:porky-scared-flipped: :stalin-gun-1:
Have any of these ghouls tried breast feeding/pumping while working a full time service industry job? I have. It sucks. Either encourage breast feeding WHILE offering paid maternity leave for At Least six months, or pay for the damn formula and suck it up.
This is so hopelessly braindead. Why do they always think anticipating republican criticisms will help? Politically disengaged chuds don't even realize that's what's happening - they just see a stupid policy in place of one they might not have otherwise been against.
