As many as 95 percent of women enter a Serbian maternity hospital with the desire to breastfeed their child. How is it possible that only 22 percent actually succeed?
"Is it a dick?"
This sentence leads to despair as many as 70 percent of mothers who have just given birth in Serbia. So many of them want and fail to breastfeed their own babies.
It is often set by the closest environment when it sees the baby for the first time, and as a rule it is set by the woman.
And Jovana from Novi Sad, during the first few months after giving birth, told "Vreme", she heard it at least a thousand times.
"It was two battles. One in which I go from one visiting nurse to another to see what's wrong and why I can't breastfeed, I turn over the entire Internet and listen to every piece of advice from women who were able to do it. And the second, where I justify myself to people all day long - how and why I didn't succeed in that," Jovana remembers. "I had the feeling that my family and society hate me, that they think I'm self-centered and selfish, that I won't sacrifice myself for my own child. Or that I'm not good enough at trying."
Jovana is among the 20 percent of women in Serbia who survived postpartum depression, and she is convinced that her mental state was further aggravated by the judgment of people who thought she didn't want it.
There is no nursing nurse.
That the situation on the ground is diametrically different is shown by data from Serbian maternity hospitals, which say that as many as 95 percent of women enter this institution with the plan to breastfeed their baby.
"You hardly have a woman who doesn't say - breastfeeding is my plan. However, 70 percent of women stop breastfeeding by the time the baby is six months old, and the reasons are numerous and mostly speak to Serbian society and the lack of a system," Andrea Đorđević, breastfeeding advisor and president of the association "Breastfeeding is not a ghost", explains to Vreme.
Only the first in a series is that there is no professional person in Serbia who would help a woman in breastfeeding or educate her. Thus, the state does not have a lactation nurse major in the medical school, nor officially anyone who deals with it.
"That's how unprofessional people give advice, and in the maternity hospital you will get two different approaches from two nurses," says Đorđević. "Rarely anyone has bad intentions, but the lack of knowledge is evident. When the ignorance is combined with the lack of support from the environment, when a woman comes out of the maternity ward, you get that killer combo and the result is that women feel very bad, and their babies do not suckle."
Another reason is that, adds the lactation consultant, women in maternity hospitals in Serbia are mostly traumatized because obstetric violence, so in the first days after giving birth, they often have to think only about how to get the head out alive.
"If, instead of asking 'Is she a Siki?', women were asked if they are okay, an incredible lot would change. That one sentence means a lot in certain remote parts of Serbia," says Đorđević.
Forced breastfeeding and intimate shaving - is this obstetric violence
She doesn't understand.
"Why don't you breastfeed your child?"
Actress Sloboda Mićalović asked this question to women all over Serbia a few years ago. She told about her own experience and how everything about breastfeeding was very difficult for her, but she didn't stop there. While a guest on the "Simply Parent" podcast, she first said that "I don't mind when a woman chooses not to do it, but I just don't understand why not." Although she mentioned that she doesn't mean that women who can't, she still added:
"If nothing else, as an actress, I would like to know psychologically, what it comes from... Those of us who have breastfed, we want to understand women who won't or can't breastfeed."
Although she later publicly apologized to all the women who felt bad, she did not stop there either, but added that "there has come a bad time when no one is allowed to say anything."
Bad women
When Jovana read this statement by Mićalović, she was, she says, "brutally furious". She got even more annoyed after the "apology".
"I was on anti-depressants because of statements like this," she says.
It is for this reason, Andrea Đorđević says that the counseling center came up with the idea of forming a special group for free support for women who could not breastfeed.
"It is necessary to remove the guilt from them. Because society sees them as corrupt. It starts from the fact that she cannot give birth, and the fact that she cannot breastfeed is also commented on according to the same principle," adds Đorđević. "And it keeps repeating itself somewhere - maybe you didn't try hard enough."
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