If My Mom Were a Platypus on ABC Radio National
Dia Michels wants to be a platypus. She explains why to Robyn Williams

Presenter: Robyn Williams
Producer: Polly Rickard and David Fisher
Saturday 4 March 2006

Program Transcript
Robyn Williams:
I'm talking to Dia Michels at the AAAS, and you belong to Platypus
Media but you're not Australian. Why are you writing about platypuses?

Dia Michels:
I'm basically obsessed with them and the reason is because I always wanted kids and so when I got to the point where I was going to have kids I found out that I hated the pregnancy, I hated childbirth, it was horrible, it was horrible, horrible. I lost 22 lbs in my first pregnancy before things turned, I was miserable. So I went on this journey to find out if I could be any other mammal what I would be. And it turns out that this platypus, which is considered a primitive mammal by people who think they're smart, is the superior creature when it comes to birth and breastfeeding. And so this has become part of my persona and every time I get pregnant I think about being a platypus, and so I'm very close to these animals.

Click here to listen to interview.

Mammals Nurse in Italian!

How do you say "platypus" in Italian? You can learn this and lots of other fascinating information at http://www.allattare.net. Maria Ersilia Armeni, a physician and internationally board-certified lactation consultant in Italy has selected a number of articles on breastfeeding and graciously translated them into Italian. "Come Allattano Gli Altri" or "How Do Other Mammals Nurse" is one of the topics addressed in our booklet, Breastfeeding at a Glance: Facts, Figures, and Trivia about Lactation – and now it is in Italian at http://www.allattare.net/articoli_view.asp?IDarticoli=11. Other translations of articles on breastfeeding by Dr.Armeni can be found at http://home.comcast.net/~ammawell/publication.html.

Grazie Dr. Armeni!

P.S. Platypus in Italian is Ornitorinco...

Authors Discuss Effort to Wean America from Baby Formula

By Brooke Adams
The Salt Lake Tribune
Thursday, September 23, 2004
www.sltrib.com

A strong case for breast-feeding is made in Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breast-Feeding, co-authored by Naomi Baumslag and Dia Michels.

Michels is untiring and sometimes shockingly blunt in her effort to get women to breast-feed their children. In this interview, Michels talks about why breast-feeding has waned, why it should be embraced by new mothers and the controversy the authors triggered with their "Lactuccino" recipe.

Michels is the founder of Platypus Media and the author of numerous books. She has three children and lives in Washington, D.C.

Q. How does acceptance of breast-feeding in the U.S. compare with the rest of the world?
A.
The rate in the United States is just about 70 percent. Kenya, Sweden, Australia, Iceland and Norway all have initiation rates at or above 99 percent.

This is what kills me: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set a goal in 2000 of having 75 percent of women initiate nursing in the hospital. So 2002 came and it set the same rate.

I find that insulting. Why would we set our goal at 75 percent if we know breast milk is best for infants . . .Why not set the goal at 95 percent and maybe you don't make it, but that goal at 75 percent is like saying our official goal is for everyone to get a C+ in high school.

Q. Why is the United States' breast-feeding rate among the lowest in the industrialized world?
A.
Ireland has the lowest rate, but considering we are the self-appointed world leaders, our rates are shockingly low and there is no excuse for that.

One cause is the intense sexualization of the breast and the confusion between exposure of the breast and obscenity. There also is confusion between the breast as a sexual organ and a functional organ.

Women are more than happy to breast-feed their children but not in public, and if they are not willing to do it in public, it is not compatible with the modern lifestyle. The message constantly reinforced is that exposing a breast is an enticement to sexual behavior.

Another factor is the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not have paid maternity leave . . . In this country, at best a woman has unpaid leave or sick time but that often doesn't foster establishment of a breast-feeding relationship.

Q. When did breast-feeding begin to fall out of favor and why?
A. The U.S. on paper is pro-breast-feeding. You would be hard-pressed to find a pediatrician who doesn't favor it.

But the reality is breast-feeding is undermined every day, beginning with the free case of formula that arrives on your doorstep when you are still pregnant.

Anytime there is a C-section, it is much harder to breast-feed successfully, and we have a 26 percent C-section rate.

Q. How long should women breast-feed?
A.
I believe strongly that breast-feeding is a mutual relationship between mother and child and as long as mother and child are both benefiting and interested in continuing, that relationship should continue.

All international pediatric groups recommend that women nurse for a minimum of two years and as long as mother and baby desire. In the U.S., pediatric groups recommend a minimum of one year, continuing after the introduction of complimentary solid foods at six months.

Q. You call breast milk a "living formula." What does that mean?
A.
Any artificial milk you can purchase is a sterile processed fluid that is in direct contrast to breast milk, which is a vital living fluid. The antibodies in breast milk are constantly changing. Let's say a mother is exposed to the chicken pox virus; her body will respond by putting those antibodies in her milk. That is one reason breast-fed babies get sick less often. The mother is constantly producing antibodies that protect baby from whatever is in the environment.

There is no way to package that. When you give a homogenized product on a schedule you lose the protection that comes from this fluid being custom made for this child.

Q. Can you breast-feed and supplement with formula?
A.
The rule in breast-feeding is any breast milk is better than no breast milk and more breast milk is better than less breast milk. I'd much rather see a woman nursing once a day than not at all. We have this phrase - lifetime lactation. For mom that means your body gives you points for every day you breast-feed. It is the same for baby. Every day baby gets breast milk is better for baby.

Q. What about dad? What is his role?
A.
What dad wants presumably is a smart, healthy, thin child, and in order to get that a baby should be nursed at the breast. Supporting that is the way to support the best development of your child. There is this notion that if dad can't feed baby he is a second-class citizen, but fathers contribute to babies in a number of ways and, as the child grows up, that will include feeding.

Q. What can employers do to make it easier for nursing mothers to work and continue to breast-feed their babies?
A.
Employers win when breast-feeding moms are encouraged to keep breast-feeding. That may take the form of lactation breaks, part-time employment, longer leave. The result is better and more-productive employees.

Q. What kind of reaction have you
gotten to your "Lactuccino" recipe, which suggests adults add breast milk to their favorite coffee drink?
A. Everything from hysteria to outrage. The recipe is...to make a tongue-in-cheek statement that this is food. You put milk on your cereal everyday. If you had to call it "cow's breast milk," you would still put it on. We did it just to say it's just food, chill out. Some people have been very, very offended, and others think it is the funniest thing in world.

But literature is rife with stories about breast milk being used to save lives. There are numerous medical situations in which adults are fed breast milk as part of their treatment - certain transplant surgeries and precancer treatments. Any time there is immunological suppression issues, it can be a huge boost because it is one of the most effect ways to build an immune system, particularly in the digestive tract.

The Best Start

The Salt Lake Tribune
Thursday, September 23, 2004
www.sltrib.com

Ironically, the only drawback to a mother's breast milk may be that it is free. It's hard to imagine, in this materialistic society, that something that isn't rung up at the cash register could be valuable, that expensive baby formula could, somehow, be inferior.

But the simple fact is: There is no better food for babies than breast milk. It is full of nutrients and laced with antibodies that help a newborn fight infection. It is also readily available, easily digested, and - free. Breast-feeding also has been linked to lower incidence of breast and ovarian cancers in mothers.

Still, only about 70 percent of new mothers in the United States breast-feed their newborns. That is unacceptable in a society that should know better. But mothers aren't to blame. Most of them work, and employers aren't flexible or creative enough to make simple schedule adjustments for new mothers. Attitudes toward breast-feeding in America are not as positive as they should be.

It's difficult to make sense of a new mother forcing her body to quit making milk so she can work longer hours, in part to pay for expensive baby formula.

Employers could and should encourage mothers who work for them to breast-feed because everyone benefits. Not only does it make for happier and healthier babies - and that makes the new mom happier, too - but it makes the mother a healthier and more productive worker.

Utah is among the nation's leaders in percentage of new mothers - 85.5 percent - who breast-feed their infants. Those mothers deserve a high-five for their efforts, because breast-feeding is sometimes difficult, especially in a culture where the breast is so fraught with sexual connotations.

The attitude that breast-feeding in public is not acceptable, even in Utah where families and children are valued, is simply wrong. Any mother discreetly feeding her baby in a restaurant, store, park or on a bus deserves, at most, a smile from passers-by, but the most appropriate response is to take no notice whatever. Most people wouldn't stare or frown at a child eating a cracker. Neither do a mother and child engaged in breast-feeding deserve ogling or disapproving looks.

In fact, there is nothing sexual about breast-feeding, except in the fuzzy thinking of some people who are embarrassed or offended by it.

If people were more accepting of public breast-feeding, the United States might have nearer the 99 percent rate of infant breast-feeding that Kenya, Sweden, Australia, Iceland and Norway all have. And that would help give American children the best start in life ever devised.

Milking an Issue
Despite taboos and aging kids, breast-feeding activist keeps going.

By Chris Shott
Washington City Paper
January 23, 2004, Page 11
Reprinted with permission
For more information, www.Washingtoncitypaper.com

Get out of the pool, Dia Michels was told.

She was wading in the shallow end in the summer of 1999, she says, when a lifeguard accused her of breaking a posted rule: No food in the water.

Not that Michels was eating at the time. But her infant daughter was.

According to the lifeguard, by baring her breast in the pool and letting the child suckle, Michels had violated Prince George's County health code.

Michels thought his legal interpretation was ridiculous: "The irony was," she says, "even if I weren't nursing, there would've been food in the water, because you couldn't, say, cut my breasts off." Michels emerged from the pool, then called up county health officials and directors of the Cheverly Swim and Racquet Club. The pool's official policy has since been changed: Moms nursing babies are now welcome.

Michels says she's used to hearing a whole array of complaints against breast-feeding. That's because she's made a habit of breast-feeding in a whole array of places.

Her daughter, Mira, whom Michels was nursing in the swimming pool, turns 5 this week. And she's kept on suckling all this time--from the aisles at Safeway to the foot of the Capitol building.

On Capitol Hill, where Michels lives with her husband and three children, witnesses report numerous public displays of lactation. "We on the Hill just call them 'Dia's Breast Stories'," says Gina Arlotto, who's known Michels for years.

"Pretty much everyone on the Hill has got one."

Michels sees herself as not just a mother, but an activist for moms' rights. An author, editor, self-publisher, and lecturer, Michels says she's best known for co-writing the 1995 book Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding, which won a prize from the American Medical Writing Association.

But it's her own public demonstrations, aimed at breaking taboos associated with the mother-milking act, that draw the most attention.

"If you read Dear Abby or Miss Manners," Michels says, "they will tell you that if you're gonna breast-feed in public, make sure you have an extra cloth to cover your body and make sure you divert your eyes. If you look discreet, then it won't be an issue."

"I say quite the opposite," she says. "Wear nothing to cover up, and you look straight at people because there's nothing to be ashamed of."

Reaction to Michels' brand of activism is often negative, she says. Not only do people often stare and make snide remarks, she's also been told to keep her breast-feedings out of her kids' classrooms, she says. Once she was booted from her local CVS.

"My policy is, if my kid's hungry, I feed them," she says. "I mean, otherwise, what's the point of carrying around a portable milk supply?"

CVS has no specific policy barring breast-feeding mothers, leaving the issue up to manager discretion, says Aponique Fangou, who manages the drug store along 7th Street SE.

"I'm not gonna kick a mother out of the store just because she's nursing," Fangou says. "But if another customer complains, I'll take her into the break room."

Michels, however, scoffs at the idea of being relegated to back rooms and hallways. "This notion that you're supposed to try to be invisible is part of the myth that somehow you shouldn't be doing this," she says.

"Ew, that's disgusting," is a common complaint, Michels says. Another remark she often overhears: "Isn't that child too old to be nursing?"

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, about 60 percent of mothers breast-feed their babies after birth, but only 22 percent continue to do so after six months. The academy recommends breast-feeding for at least 12 months and thereafter for as long as both mother and child desire.

For Michels, the desire always exceeded the recommendation. She has breastfed each of her three children well past their second birthdays.

People might find it odd, but Michels says there's nothing wrong with it. "People think it's not normal to nurse a 4-year-old," she says. "The reality is, it's not typical to nurse a 4-year-old. What I'm doing is not typical. That doesn't mean it's not the best thing for the kids."

She's quick to discuss the health benefits of breast milk--"a living formula," she says, packed with hormones and antibodies to ward off illness and infection. Formula-fed babies have higher rates of illness, hospitalization, and death than breast-fed babies, she argues. Her recent book, Breastfeeding Facts for Fathers, suggests that mother's milk is "good for grown-ups, too," and offers a recipe for a homemade coffee drink called "Lactuccino: 1/2 cup breastmilk, 3/4 cup fresh-brewed coffee, 2 tablespoons sugar....garnish with cinnamon."

Michels realizes, however, that her breast-feeding days are numbered. Mira turns 5 this week and her interest in mother's milk is waning.

Michels weaned her two older children, Akaela, 14, and Zaydek, 11, off breast milk when they were 2-and-a-half and 5 years old, respectively. Adhering to the concept of child-led weaning, she plans to let Mira keep on suckling until she stops on her own.

"The joke," Michels says, "has always been that Mira would nurse until she goes to college."

But the cut-off date is rapidly approaching. "Nowadays, she's only nursing maybe three times a week," Michels says, "usually around bedtime"--away from the public eye.

Michels says she's not sad to see it end. "For years, it was something I dreaded," she says. "But I've nursed for much of the last 14 years, and I think it's time to be okay with it."

"Pretty soon," she adds, "we're gonna be getting driver's licenses."