Here is an excerpt from the People post:

“It’s very hard,” the actress confessed on Britain’s morning show GMTV. “I stopped at three months, [it was] about as much as I could do.”

I would write something really eloquent and deep, but I ranted in my email to my friend. I figured I would just paste it right here:

I am really irritated. This makes me so mad. How many poor moms will give up because they figure if the super celebrity mom couldn’t do it, how could they. This pisses me off just as much as EVERY nurse and doctor in the NICU telling me how hard breastfeeding twins is (they were referring to supply, which is completely bogus because supply meets demand and I had TONS of milk before returning to work anyway).

Her main complaint seems to be positioning, which I found actually pretty easy. Setting them was hard (I needed help from someone at first because getting both positioned was hard since you had to do one baby one-handed at first). She should really (1) try harder or (2) learn more about it or (3) keep her problems to herself.

While it is good for mom to know sometimes it doesn’t work out, I don’t believe three months of trying breastfeeding is enough for a public figure who surely has tons of help with everything. Did she call LLL? Did she have a post-partum doula help?

So that was my email rant on the subject. I didn’t edit it for public consumption here because I wanted you to see my email as it was sent. I know sometimes a mom does need to stop beating herself up with guilt about failure to breastfeed, but certainly we should all encourage moms to try and to seek out support.

And I am here to tell you, you certainly can breastfeed twins. It was probably one of the more fascinating stages of my life to nurse two babies at once. If you do have trouble with something as easy to remedy as positioning help, please seek out assistance from an experienced twin mom, a lactation consultant, a friend, La Leche League before you give up. And if you do that first and still find breastfeeding twins isn’t for you, then at least you will know you have tried.

EDITED TO ADD: I know some of you think I am picking on Angelina Jolie for not finding success breastfeeding twins. I don’t criticize her for giving up. I criticize her for giving up for a BAD reason and when she has so many resources available. I criticize her for not mentioning resources. Most of all, though, it angers me that she is perpetuating a myth that twins can’t be breastfed… and believe me, it is a VERY common myth. I heard it all the time, and even today people on Twitter who are positive are saying how they think it’s so amazing I BF twins. Like it’s a big triumph. I think it should be COMMONPLACE. I know I was determined because of the issues with my first child and in a way it was like my chance to make up for it… but I also know that it never entered my mind twins would be harder initially. Maybe it’s because I knew a friend of mine who did very well with twins, so I had a good example. That always gave me hope. So perhaps THAT is truly my point. We need good examples to inspire us, not bad examples to give us a reason to give up. Then, even if we do give up, at least we will have tried first.

Photo of breastfeeding infant, © Marek Bernat.