HHS Toned Down Breast Feeding Ads

In this article, there is a debate about whether or not some pretty intense breast feeding ads should or should not have been toned down. I believe they should have been and I'm grateful that they were. It took me a year of working at least 38 hrs a week to qualify for a weeks worth of paid vacation. I had to pre-schedule this paid week off and that was the only amount of time I could afford to take off. My boyfriend doesn't work because of a surgery on his foot that went horribly wrong. The only source of income in the house is mine. I have no choice but to work. When I was pregnant with my son, my due date was the 24th of July. Trying my best to figure out how I was going to pre-schedule a week of paid time off to have my baby was meaningless. I ended up settling for the entire week surrounding my due date. Imagine my frustration when the little bugger didn't arrive untile five days after his due date. My point is, I took an extra four days off without pay to rest and be with my son but that was absolutely all I could afford. I made serious efforts to breast feed my son but breasts do not produce the milk needed unless you can pump or feed several times a day. I don't know about where other women work but I had only a couple fifteen minute breaks and no place that I could privately pump my breasts at work. I was doing half formula and half breastmilk for the first month but then school started again. I was in classes from 8 in the morning until 2 or 4 all week and then I went straight to work and didn't get home every night until around midnight or 1am. It didn't take more than a week for my breasts to start drying up completely. It just doesn't work sometimes and I had no other choice. I wanted desperately to form that bond, through breast feeding, with my son. You cannot imagine the guilt that I feel already and how angry it makes me that I couldn't. I hardly ever watch TV but if I were to watch some and I saw a commercial with an insulin bottle that had a rubber nipple on the end or an asthma inhaler with a rubber nipple on the end, I would probably start sobbing. I had asthma as a child and my first thought while reading this was, "Did I have it because my mother didn't breast feed me?" I would wonder for the rest of my life whether every illness or cold could have been prevented by breast feeding, as if I wont even without seeing the ads. All of these unhealthy attributes or illnesses have simply been shown to correlate with a lack of breast feeding. No cause has been shown. I think we should be less concerned with how many mothers are not breast feeding and more concerned with why. I can't imagine that any mother, knowing the benefits of doing so, would choose not to breast feed for some minute reason. I'm sure there are some but I would bet that they are an extreme minority. There is an interesting graph on this website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave) that shows the levels of paid and unpaid maternity leave and paid and unpaid paternity leave. As you scroll down pay close attention to what it say for the US and then for the entire graph of European countries. The article from our reading pointed out how much higher rates of breast feeding are in European countries, migh this have something to do with it? Since Wikipedia is not really a trusted site because anybody can add information to it, I've also added a link to this article in USA Today that points out how the US stands apart from the rest of the industrialized world: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-07-26-maternity-leave_x.htm.