S/he tells you that you must stop breastfeeding because your are sick or your baby is sick, or because you will be taking medicine or you will have a medical test done. There are occasional, rare, situations when breastfeeding cannot continue, but often health professionals only assume that the mother cannot continue and often they are wrong. The health professional who is supportive of breastfeeding will make efforts to find out how to avoid interruption of breastfeeding (the information in white pages of the blue Compendium of Pharmaceutical Specialties is not a good reference-every drug is contraindicated according to it as the drug companies are more interested in their liability than in the interests of mothers and babies). When a mother must take medicine, the health professional will try to use medication which does not require the mother to stop breastfeeding. (In fact, very few medications require the mother to stop breastfeeding). It is extremely uncommon for there to be only one medication which can be used for a particular problem. If the first choice of the health professional is a medication which requires you to stop breastfeeding, you have a right to be concerned that s/he has not really thought about the importance of breastfeeding.

S/he is surprised to learn that your 6 month old is still breastfeeding. Many health professionals believe that babies should be continued on artificial baby milk for at least nine months and even twelve months, but at the same time seem to believe that breastmilk and breastfeeding are unnecessary and even harmful if continued longer than six months. Why is the imitation better than the original? Shouldn't you wonder what this line of reasoning implies? In most of the world, breastfeeding to 2 or 3 years of age is common and normal.