This Week’s Shannonigans: Bloomberg’s Breast is Best

For this week’s installment of why I would like to stick my daughter back up my vagina and keep her in my uterus until things get better, I would like to take on Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

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Here’s Mayor Mike scolding Kermit the Frog because his mom never breastfed him. Never mind that amphibians don’t breastfeed their young, Kermit’s mom had no idea how to raise a frog and should have listened to a human man who has nothing better to do with his time because he is worth 22 billion and spends his time acting like the random old lady on the street who screams at you for not wearing a hat and scarf in spring.

Anyway, back to humans. Since women don’t already have enough people telling them what to do with their bodies and new moms don’t have enough strangers judging their parenting choices, New York City Mayor Bloomberg has decided to help out and lock up the formula in hospitals and only give it to women who need it for medical reasons…And before each bottle is given, new moms will be given a talk about how breastfeeding is better than formula.

When I first heard this I started laughing because New York City hospitals are run with about as much organization as a fast food restaurant located next to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. All the nurses run around like chickens with their heads cut off because the hospitals are horribly understaffed and everyone is so afraid of lawsuits they never give you straight answers to your questions.

I am a New York City mom who really wanted to breastfeed. I gave birth at New York Presbyterian Hospital which is supposedly one of the best hospitals in the world. I don’t want to bore you with my sob story but I spent three days at this hospital and whenever I asked where a lactation consultant was I was told she was on her way. It was like Waiting for Godot. On the third day, I decided I needed help breastfeeding but wasn’t going to get it at a hospital so complained and was met with, “Well, what do you expect? You gave birth on a Friday afternoon.” Oh excuse me…. next time I have a baby I will make sure it doesn’t get in the way of the hospital staff’s ability to get drunk and dance to Katy Perry’s “TGIF.”

So, after five days of trying to teach myself to breastfeed and my daughter not gaining weight, I decided to be a horrible mom and feed my child by giving her formula.

Many moms like me want to breastfeed but face tons of obstacles. I used to think that it was because most moms don’t get paid maternity leave, never get enough education on the subject, and it’s so painful I would rather give birth to my daughter every day than breast feed every day for 6 months. But I was wrong. Women don’t continue to breastfeed because the high prices of formula aren’t restrictive enough. We need the formula to be looked away and hidden like it’s candy so women who can’t breastfeed aren’t tempted to do something dumb like feed their screaming children.

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I could write a trilogy longer than 100 Shades of Grey and Twilight combined, about my opinions on breastfeeding vs. formula and if men like Bloomberg keep acting like this I may very well have to. But unfortunately, Bloomberg’s new policies go into effect this September and I don’t have time to because I am raising my 17-month-old child who shockingly has never had an ear infection, pneumonia, or diarrhea even though I fed her the devil’s milk: FORMULA. So I would like to propose a simple solution.

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So, my solution is this. Since breast feeding is so important to Mayor Mike Bloomberg, I think that if a New York City mom experiences trouble breastfeeding the hospital should shine a huge boob signal in the sky. Then superhero Boobman Bloomberg can hop in his Boob Mobile and save NYC moms from themselves and breastfeed their babies. Then no one would be tempted to use formula, because we would have Boobman Bloomberg to reastfeed our babies.

And that’s been this week’s Shannonigans!

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