This is a great article by Sayantani DasGupta about the problem with all this individualism in the breastfeeding vs. bottle-feeding debate.. her piece also pays particular attention to the rise in anti-breastfeeding articles over at Jezebel. (Thanks to @chirpingnorton for the link).
But the critical issue here is that Baby Friendly Hospitals are a systemic way that breastfeeding initiation can be enhanced. People complaining about “breastfeeding bullies” keep talking about the issue of choice. Yet, the ways that most maternity wards operate in the U.S. actually reduce all women’s choices across the board – whether you ultimately choose to breastfeed for any amount of time or not.
The truth of the matter is, issues such as insufficient milk production, a failure to latch on properly, and resultant problems such as infant weight loss are often tied to immediate post-birth practices — practices that are determined by the policies of the particular maternity ward. These are systemic failures, NOT the so-called “failure” of individual women.
And this over at Counterpunch. Infuriating. A mother tries to get on with her life by working around the realities of having a sick baby while also being in paid employment and she becomes a target for it. This is what it is to live in a misogynistic capitalist culture where both sickness and caring are considered deviant behaviours.
So here’s the story, internet: I fed my sick baby during feminist anthropology class without disrupting the lecture so as to not have to cancel the first day of class. I doubt anyone saw my nipple, because I’m pretty good at covering it. But if they did, they now know that I too, a university professor, like them, have nipples. Or at least that I have one.
(Thanks to this great post over at The Mamafesto and to a reader, Lisa, for alerting me to the story).
The first point there seems to be a strawman, going by my experience in USA at least.
I am someone who has breastfed both my children for over 18 months each, and center my activism around allowing other women who want to do the same to be ABLE to do the same. But I am also vehemently ANTI-lactivism, ANTI-La Leche League, ANTI-Kelleymom, etc., basically, ANTI whatever currently passes for breastfeeding support in USA, because of how focused on mothers they are when BY FAR the biggest barrier to breastfeeding is the fact that we have zero paid maternity leave, and if we have the fortune of working for any of over 60% of private employers in the US who are exempt from FMLA, zero maternity leave period.
Not all the education in the world, nor all the so-called breastfeeding support during our two-day hospital stay (for those lucky enough to have insurance that covers it), is going to help mothers breastfeed if they cannot afford to physically stay with their babies in the first few weeks following birth. But not one peep about this do we hear from our so-called lactivists.
Instead, lactivists focus on shaming women for “choosing” not to breastfeed. Even if we consider the demographic lactivists take aim at – middle-class-and-higher stay-at-home moms, their approach is inexcusable: they tell so many lies to mothers about what breastfeeding is and how “easy” and “painless” it is “if you do it right” (as if mastitis is the result of me doing something wrong, and *I* am to blame for it!). They focus on understating the work involved in breastfeeding, and shaming women for choosing not to do it, instead of truly supporting breastfeeding mamas.
So, yeah, it’s not those two days in the hospital that are ruining moms’ chances to breastfeed. Lactivists need to stop ignoring the elephant in the room… but I’m not holding my breath, because it would take them becoming – dare I say it – less misogynistic, and consider, for once, that low breastfeeding rates may not be something mothers are doing wrong!
Nadini – have you seen the breastfeeding rates for Canada next to those for the US? They’re not that different. Slightly higher, but really not that high after the first couple of months. And yet, the majority of employed Canadian women get one year’s parental leave (which can of course be shared with their partner – but in my experience most don’t), with job protection and Employment Insurance to give them a stipend hopefully allowing them to stay home for the first year. Most of the other issues around the support of breastfeeding in Canada are similar to the US, though. Maternity leave, by itself, is not making as big a difference as many would hope, unfortunately. There are other wonderful reasons to have supported parental leaves, and I believe it should happen, but breastfeeding rates aren’t soaring because of longer leaves, unfortunately.
That’s true, and moreover, I would liek Nadini to consider the fact that many US’s mothers do not in fact work outside the home – about a quarter, which is a minority, but not insignificant. You don’t find higher rates of breastfeeding among US women who stay at home (in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the number were slightly lower, since the “bounce” in bf rates recently seems tied to professional educated women who work, but I could be wrong about that).
And Juliette, yeah totally. I have a Canadian friend who had a year of maternity leave, and breastfed, although I don’t know for how long. But even though she had a vaginal birth, the nurses encouraged her to put the baby in the nursery at night, so she could sleep and so the baby could get on a “schedule”. She was very proud later that the nurses had put the baby on a “schedule” and so she maintained it. The “schedule” was 1 feed per FOUR HOURS. Yes, that’s how she fed her newborn. She was surprised that he had fussy periods in the afternoon – I was like, maybe you should just cluster feed him, although I didn’t actually say that because I don’t offer unsolicited advice. But I was pretty surprised that she successfully bf him for however long, considering that schedule and that mindset, which is so antithetical to how breastfeeding really works. Clearly, the nurses were ignorant and passing along misinformation to all the mothers there. (My friend also introduced solids before 6 months on the advice of her pediatrician who said it would help the baby “sleep better”. Ga! Although maybe it did because it’s possible the baby was hungry.)
@ Nadini: Oh and I just want to add that I was able to breastfeed despite being a working mom BECAUSE of lactivists who published informative works about breastfeeding, because of IBLCs like the one who ran my local LLL, and because of the support of my mom, who had also breastfed, with the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding by her side. In the US even if you aren’t overtly booby trapped by the hospital, you *have to teach yourself how*, either by finding a support group or reading and watching videos. Thank GOD for lactivism.
Nandini and Perpetua both make good points. I’m with Nandini about how damaging some of the lactivist pressure can be (I saw many a friend go through something like her example of bad professional advice) and I submit to Perpetua that perhaps the reason she was so successful was the cultural knowledge in having a mother who breastfed, which is a rarity for our generation. Most homemaking isn’t rocket science but practical skills, i.e. they require teaching, learning, and practice.
And this brings up my secondary complaint against DasGupta’s article–she focuses too narrowly on the days after birth for breastfeeding success or failure. The problem is much more systemic. We who have been trained to be doctors, lawyers, and accountants rarely have much experience with domestic life and skills. In this case, we hear from the experts that breastfeeding is this natural, bonding, wonderfulness of convenience. And it is…after you struggle through cluster feeds and raw nipples and other difficulties of the first 6 weeks or so. But we don’t know that. We don’t expect that. The experts gloss over that. What matters the practical stuff when we are talking about breastfeeding?!
That second story is unbelievable. Unbelievable.
I have a feeling of annoyance with Professor Pine’s belief that her breastfeeding has nothing to do with her being a woman, that it is some sort of biological determinism to acknowledge that the ones with the breasts are the ones who breastfeed.
Furthermore, her insulting dismissal of women who have fought for breastfeeding rights is misogynist and arrogant. Professor Pine breastfed her child at work because she could. Because women fought for her right to do so.
I think Professor Pine’s internalized misogyny and ambivalence at being a woman have a lot to do with her feelings of contempt toward those “lactivists” she derides. She’s being disingenuous to pretend that her breastfeeding happenned in a vacuum – that it’s simply no big deal, and she can’t imagine why on earth it would be. Her whole article smacks of, “I’m not like those other women/mothers who make a big deal of everything.” The fact is, motherhood can’t be separated from the rest of who mothers are. To pretend it can be is to degrade motherhood again.
thank you for this. To me Professor Pine is behaving exactly like those women who vehemently state that they aren’t feminists, and deride feminism, all the while enjoying things like a nice professorial type job, and the vote, and stuff like that. The professor clearly enjoys these privileges, including the privilege of not having to suppress her lactation.
Nandini, perhaps the lactivists you are so ANTI- are doing one small thing to help women breastfeed. Perhaps others of us can fight for better EVERYTHING for women, without wasting our anger on women who are trying to help in areas other than our own pet causes.
Interesting contrast to what seems to be happening in NZ at the moment, with the apparent demonetization of parents who formula feed.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/7552005/Judged-mums-defend-bottles
It’s the right of a parent to choose how to feed their baby, whether breast or bottle. It’s awful that some women are made to feel like they are a failure at being a mother purely because they aren’t able breastfeed for whatever reason (cancer, inability to produce enough milk etc). We have no idea what the background circumstances are, and we have no right to judge.
Isn’t feminism supposed to be about having choice and self-determination anyway?
Women get shit both sides of the fence. Women who are judged for formula feeding exist in a culture where women are also judged for breastfeeding. The two aren’t mutually exclusive because it’s part of a wider judgement on mothers, which is part of a wider judgement on women.
Supporting breastfeeding isn’t about demonising formula. It’s about supporting the vast majority of mothers who want to and try to breastfeed but who are let down by a wider societal lack of knowledge, understanding and compassion. If you cannot breastfeed, you cannot breastfeed. Simple. But if you really want to but you end up with a partner who won’t support you, or a support network who undermines you, or medical staff who are misinformed, and a disruptive wider culture, that isn’t a choice you’ve made freely – it’s a choice you were coerced into making.
Exactly, and you need to be able to make an informed choice, which isn’t happening. It goes from one extreme to the other, which isn’t fair on anyone involved.
I had a fully natural birth with immediate fully-topless skin-to-skin breastfeeding (“immediate” meaning the second she showed interest – there were a few minutes) for an hour. Yet I never produced enough milk (was never engorged, either). Within four days I had to supplement my milk with bottles, and was very soon expressing five times a day as well as breastfeeding seven times the same day – and on assorted meds that were supposed to help (and also made me gain weight right when I didn’t need more). I somehow got the impression that not producing enough milk was unusual, and it was only when I was researching Australian history that I discovered that it was incredibly, incredibly common in the 19th century. That was a huge relief to me.
[…] this story about the American Professor who briefly breastfed her baby during class rather than canc…? Since then that story got quite big in the US Internet media and there were a lot of predictably […]
Wow. I agree with Adrienne Pine 100%. If a male teacher had bottle-fed his child in class would there have been a story out of it? And has breastfeeding a baby in a workplace ever been illegal? For the great historical sweep of time women have worked with babies and children alongside them. It is only a brief modern period which has seen the modern daycare services, and formula as an affordable and safe feeding option.
Was the story ever published by the Eagle?