What message are we sending bottle-feeding families when we place formula in the same retail category as cigarettes?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I have a powerful memory of first reflecting on Irish breastfeeding politics. I was 20 and visiting a then- \nnew American coffee chain that had arrived on my local main street. Amid trying to figure out which \nseries of words they wanted me to say to produce what was erstwhile obtainable as a ?large black \ncoffee? I noticed something unusual about the setting: the caf? had a disproportionate number of tables \nfilled with women with babies. It was middayish and perhaps some kind of class had just finished \nnearby. At one table of four, two women were in different stages of openly breastfeeding babies and \nchatting. Initially?in line with my Irishness?I looked away, embarrassed by the possibility of a tiny \namount of nudity. And then, thinking about how nice it was that Ireland?the Ireland of the Magdalene \nlaundries, Mother and Baby homes and no divorce until the mid-1990s?had, at least in this leafy \nsuburb, reached a place where some women felt at peace having a breast, or part of a breast, out at work \nin public. I thought about what a marker of spiritual growth this represented for the country and did my \nbest to offer what I?m sure was an awkward and possibly creepy ?good on you? smile in their general \ndirection. \nI say all of this to say that I think that it?s wonderful that we have come to a place where breastfeeding \nin public can be a more relaxed part of family life. We have National Breastfeeding Week, an annual \n?Latching On? ceremony, Breastival, and increasingly, parental leave contracts include special \nprovisions to support breastfeeding women returning to work. I don?t doubt that we still have far to go, \nand that many still face difficult choices and anxiety in their infants? journeys to solid food, but I?m \nhopeful that the promised land on that front is much closer than it has ever been, and, is approaching \nwith ever-greater haste. \nThese improvements for breastfeeding parents have not sprung from nowhere. Governing bodies at \nvarious levels have implemented policies aimed at increasing national breastfeeding figures because \nIreland?s rates are low when compared with socioeconomically similar countries. This push towards \nbreastfeeding has, in my view, had some negative consequences for people who formula feed. This \narticle is about what I perceive to be a radical dogma that has emerged in Ireland. Having read what I \ncan only describe as a bizarre and frustrating characterisation of the current situation by Sabina Higgins, \nas a research academic, I feel somewhat compelled to say a few words about some of this mythos. I am \nalso a new mother, at great peace with a choice I made early on about feeding my daughter, and \nfrequently flabbergasted by the rhetoric I find in the literature and advice on feeding infants. So, I try \nto do two things below: 1) make the case that the public rhetoric around feeding babies is often extreme \nand misleading, and 2) I discuss my own motivations in deciding to formula feed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".