I'd like someone to launch a well-funded public service campaign to take on one of the less-recognized threats to a healthy pregnancy and healthy infancy. "Pregnancy: More Joy, Less Guilt." "Guilt: Bad for Moms, Bad for Babies." Any deep-pocket volunteers?

The idea came to me after watching a video clip of a public service advertisement that ran this spring to "encourage" women to breastfeed their babies. Called "Ladies' Night," the ad shows a hugely pregnant woman riding a mechanical bull during a raucus ladies' night at a bar. She gets flipped off the bull backwards, a sight that left me gripping my abdomen in a protective reflex that dates back to my own pregnancies more than a decade ago. Words appear on a black screen: "You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born. Why start after? Breastfeed exclusively for six months." (This clip and another from the same campaign can be seen via links in a New York Times article on the current push to increase breast-feeding rates.)

I'm not questioning the goal. Research is pretty clear that breastfeeding has important benefits for moms and babies. It strengthens infants' immune systems and helps protect them from colds, flue, ear infections, and diarrhea. There's growing evidence it can ward off obesity, breast cancer incidence both in breast-feeding mothers and their daughters who are breast fed as infants, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, diabetes, leukemia, asthma. Some research indicates it may increase IQ.

(Sort of sounds like the unnamed miracle product in Tom Waits tune, "Step Right Up":

"That's right, it filets, it chops, it dices, slices,
Never stops, lasts a lifetime, mows your lawn
And it mows your lawn and it picks up the kids from school
It gets rid of unwanted facial hair, it gets rid of embarrassing age spots,
It delivers a pizza, and it lengthens, and it strengthens
And it finds that slipper that's been at large
under the chaise lounge for several weeks...")

My point is, why is the federal government spending money to guilt-trip women into breastfeeding instead of trying to guilt-trip employers into making it a practical possibility for working women? There's already plenty of guilt and anxiety heaped on the aching backs of pregnant women, who worry about sitting next to smokers, sipping a glass of wine, drinking coffee, eating too much, eating too little, listening to Metallica rather than Mozart, and the possiblity that all that worrying will harm their infants.

Breast-feeding is really, really hard for most working moms -- and that's some 60 percent of the mothers of very young infants -- to pull off. I managed it with my first child, but only because I was very lucky, very stubborn, and not particularly shy. I still remember sitting in a toilet stall in the grungy green ladies' room in the Boston Statehouse pumping breastmilk with a little plastic hand pump, then putting the results into the press gallery fridge, wedged in among the tuna sandwiches, wrapped in a plain paper bag labelled: "Do NOT Use This in Your Coffee!" By the time my second son was born, I was no longer working full-time, so it was easier. Though I was still loudly berated for discreetly nursing in a quiet corner of a nearly-empty museum and suffered three painful bouts of mastitis.

The fact is, guilt-tripping moms to do something about which we are not really comfortable as a society, and which we don't support in other, more substantive, ways, is just plain mean. Breast-feeding rates have been increasing modestly with public education efforts that rely on a less bullying, hectoring tone, but dramatic progress will require a real commitment and an honest effort to remove some of the real barriers. When it works, breast-feeding can be a great source of joy. And that tastes better than guilt.