From the Other Side Now

Two great people I admire and appreciate, Tim Russert and Edwina Froehlich, passed away this week. I doubt that Edwina will get the extensive coverage that Russet gets, but she should. Wouldn't it be a great world if the pioneers of promoting what mamas and babies need would be elevated to that of politicians, warmongers, wrong-doers, journalists, and oh, yeah, Hollywood stars? (Not that Mr. Russert was any of those).

Who is Edwina Froehlich, most people ask? She is the founder of the Le Leche League.

When I gave birth to my first child in 1975 breast-feeding was discouraged and it was socially the wrong thing to do. I was breast-fed, as was my mother, a twin, in 1930. I know now that ancestral memory is a contributor of success in breast-feeding. Thank God, because two nurses kept my baby from me and waited for my husband and mother to leave (I believe now). They worked very hard to discourage me ... "You are too young. It will tie you down." (Edwina was too old! What is the perfect age? How absurd that the childbearing body would be too anything to finish the task.) They said, "Formula is better." As they continued to brow-beat me and I resisted, as one said smugly, "We already gave him formula and he took it just fine." Fortunately, my sweet baby latched on like he'd been doing it forever. (So glad I had nursed my dollies along with my sister being breast-fed). I suspect (in my feeling, sensate awareness now) that my eighteen-year old look (or smirk as my mother would call such a look) said, "Ha!!! So F-you and go away," because they did. Thankfully.

Twenty-eight years later I was at a lactation training and when I heard the instructor say that the FIRST FEEDING COATS and PRIMES the gut system, a rage rose up in me. Seemingly outa of nowhere my usual "cool, calm, and collected" self felt and explosion boiling up. THAT feeling is the expression of the feelings and knowing of my body at the time ... that were suppressed and denied.  I had to leave the room and go to privacy in the bathroom to do the things I know as a clinician of trauma healing to discharge it.

The feelings? How dare they? How dare they take away something so fundamentally necessary and simple.? Were his hospitalizations at age four for bowel issues related? What do we women (and men) do with our stuffed emotions about our violations during this most profound human experience -- birth? Woman have to stop doing this --- betrayal --- to other women.

Thank YOU, Edwina -- for you have contributed to my life personally and you have surely made the world a better place for eons to come.

June 13, 2008

Edwina Froehlich, 93, La Leche League Pioneer, Is Dead

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Edwina Froehlich, who was inspired to help found La Leche League to support breast-feeding after being told at the age of 35 that she was too old to make breast milk for her baby, died Sunday in Arlington Heights, Ill. She was 93 and lived in Inverness, Ill.

Her death followed a stroke two weeks earlier, said her son, Assemblyman Paul D. Froehlich.

A pioneer on several fronts of motherhood, she worked for Young Christian Workers, a Roman Catholic lay organization, before marrying John Froehlich when she was in her early 30s. She had her first child a couple of years later, making her comparatively old to have a first child at the time, and she made the controversial decision to forgo giving birth in a hospital in favor of a more natural delivery in her Franklin Park, Ill., home, with an obstetrician attending.

At a time when most pediatricians encouraged formula and bottle-feeding and when there were few scientific studies demonstrating the health benefits of breast milk, Mrs. Froehlich chose to breast-feed all of her babies, said another La Leche founder, Mary White.

"We used to tell the mothers the three main obstacles to successful breast-feeding were doctors, hospitals, and social pressure," Mrs. White said.

In 1956, when Mrs. White and a friend, Marian Tompson, decided to start a community organization to support and educate local breast-feeding mothers, Mrs. Froehlich was one of the first women they approached. Soon, monthly meetings were being held in Mrs. Froehlich's home, and a new phone line was installed so she could answer questions coming in from mothers across the country, Mrs. White said.

"We didn't have any information, " said Mrs. Tompson, another of the original group of seven La Leche League founders. "There weren't any books out there, and women just didn't talk about these things. Only 18 percent of women in the U.S. left the hospital breast-feeding at that time."

As La Leche League of Franklin Park grew, becoming La Leche League International in 1964, Mrs. Froehlich took on additional roles, including serving as assistant executive director for many years and, more recently, as a board member and a member of the Founders' Advisory Council.

She was one of the authors of "The Womanly Art of Breast-feeding, " the league's manifesto, which was first put together in loose-leaf form in 1958 and later published as a bound book in 1963. More than two million copies are in print.

Mrs. Froehlich was born Edwina Hearn on Jan. 5, 1915, in the Bronx.

In addition to her son Paul, of Schaumburg, Ill., she is survived by two other sons, Peter and David, who live in the Chicago area; a sister, Pauline, who lives in North Carolina; and nine grandchildren. Her husband, John, died in 1997.

Mrs. Froehlich donated her body to the University Of Illinois for research; her children think she wanted to continue serving science even after her death.