Breast Is Best For Whom?
October 16, 2009 No Comments
The Case Against Breastfeeding is an article rife with contradictions. The author, Hanna Rosin, is still actively breastfeeding her youngest, for starters.
She takes science to task for making mother’s milk the gold standard in childcare while arguing that the establishment is pushing it based on common sense.
She has picked an easy target, because the real cuprit here is much harder to attack.
The Breast Is Best campaign has reached fever pitch and now a mother is not fit unless she is willing to pump milk on a regular basis. Why is the entire force of the medical establishment, from the American Academy of Pediatrics to UNICEF, pushing this as the only rational choice for a baby?
“It’s become another way to control women and make them feel insecure about their identity as women,” said Meri Kolbrenner, in the video of the round table discussion that accompanies the article.
Rosin blames the establishment for promoting this campaign based on filmsy evidence. The benefits are difficult to test and the results are mostly inconclusive.
“Because the populations that breastfeed in America are vastly different, on the whole, from the populations that don’t breast feed, it can’t be compared,” she said.
And when I look around my daughter’s second-grade class, I can’t seem to pick out the unfortunate ones: “Oh, poor little Sophie, whose mother couldn’t breast-feed. What dim eyes she has. What a sickly pallor. And already sprouting acne!”
At one point in the video she critises the American Academy of Pediatrics is pushing breastfeeding based more on common sense than on empirical evidence.
But it is common sense. Breast milk is the best for a baby because the milk was designed for the baby. It could be that formula works just as well, or almost just as well, but as she as pointed out that is something we will never know.
Rosin is pissed off about a lot of things. She’s annoyed that mothers are given a set of rules to which they must adhere. She is annoyed that breastfeeding only affects the mother. She is annoyed that women are expected to hook themselves up to a machine and express milk like cows.
These problems aren’t created by the Academy or the UN, they are product of biology clashing with society.
It is a fact that women, and not men, are designed to breastfeed. For thousands of years we could do what work we needed to do with a baby strapped to our boobs. Farming wasn’t elegant to begin with. The industrial revolution forced entire families off their land and into factories. Initially this worked like the farms, where fathers, mother and children worked side by side.
A shift took place and the modern workforce divided men and women into providers and caregivers. These artificial designations were enforced with the promotion of mothers to Madonnas. The mothers were suddenly the heart of the home and fathers were just the guys bringing home the bacon. Essential to the running of the family, but totally divorced from it’s emotional life.
Then women said, “Actually we’d quite like to have a life now,” and men graciously allowed them to enter the man’s world. But this world does not accomodate caregivers.
Rosin rails against the breast pumping machines. She said that pumping at work “bring together all the awfulness of being a modern mother.”
Women should breastfeed for six months, but many cannot take any time off to do so. Blue collar workers have it even harder, where jobs are even less accommodating of regular half hour milk expression sessions. Kolbrenner describes pumping in her office with the door closed and locked. A knock at the door suddenly makes her feel extremely vulnerable.
“I’m not usually naked at work, but now I’m naked attached to machinery.”
Don’t blame the milk, the problem is caused by employees being allowed to also be parents. And it is a major problem.
Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.
She tells the story of one friend who refused to breastfeed because of the inequality it would introduce into her marriage.
I recalled her with sisterly love a few months ago, at three in the morning, when I was propped up in bed for the second time that night with my new baby (note the my). My husband acknowledged the ripple in the nighttime peace with a grunt, and that’s about it. And why should he do more? There’s no use in both of us being a wreck in the morning. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to seethe.
The fact that women produce milk for their babies is immutable, but how that is done can be fluid. In the discussion Anne Dickerson says Rosin’s friend had an outmoded way of looking at the problem: “She was saying I want to be more like a man and not breastfeed. I think that is the old way. The new way is how can I be a woman, and work my way through the world as a woman? Which might mean breastfeeding in the middle of the day.”
Presently this problem is presented to families as an issue for the mom to work out as it is apparently her responsibility. Other responsibilities flow from it and suddenly the woman is doing 80 percent of the work at home and holding down a full time job.
In my set, no husband tells his wife that it is her womanly duty to stay home and nurse the child. Instead, both parents together weigh the evidence and then make a rational, informed decision that she should do so. Then other, logical decisions follow: she alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick, and so on.
Luckily my set is younger than hers and as most of the men are not yet fathers, they still have the ability to step up to the plate with this. There has already been a shift in younger dads who want to spend more time with their kids. It is no longer assumed that if the children are too young to play sports they are the moms job.
Men and women are moving closer to equal parenting which will put even more strain on the work life balance. Outside the office there are little people that need their moms and dads and somewhere something has to give.
Breastmilk isn’t the problem here — it’s the fact that feeding a child is an issue for the whole family. Until that is recognized, breastfeeding mothers will continue to feel a little bit like underappreciated cows.
