There’s a line I never thought I’d write. This week the pop star, who had a double mastectomy in 2012 when she discovered she was a carrier of the mutated BRCA2 gene and had an 80% chance of developing breast cancer, revealed she was in tears just hours after taking her new born son home because he was rooting for her breasts but of course she was unable to breast feed him.
As a mum who loved every moment of breast feeding I can’t imagine what this must have felt like, watching a tiny mouth desperate to latch on but being physically unable to give him what he was so naturally searching for.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the star was then blasted for not breast feeding her baby and ‘promoting’ bottle feeding by an (ignorant) Twitter follower after she tweeted a picture of a bottle sterilizer she had received as a gift from Tommee Tippee.
Both incidents raise interesting questions, so I was surprised to see absolutely no mention of either of them in the talk forum of Mumsnet, where such issues are usually examined inside out. And presumably, with advances in medical detection and women able make informed choices about preventative measures such as mastectomy, such cases are likely to be on the rise.
Perhaps, even in 2014, this is still one taboo too far?
Lovely post.