I’m still formulating (hah!) my thoughts on this and I want to hold back until I’ve finished a book review I’m working on, which just happens to be for a breastfeeding guide, but I can’t let this article drift out there indefinitely without casting my own link to it. Hanna Rosin’s The Case Against Breastfeeding has definitely set the cat among the pigeons (myself included).
One afternoon at the playground last summer, shortly after the birth of my third child, I made the mistake of idly musing about breast-feeding to a group of new mothers I’d just met. This time around, I said, I was considering cutting it off after a month or so. At this remark, the air of insta-friendship we had established cooled into an icy politeness, and the mothers shortly wandered away to chase little Emma or Liam onto the slide. Just to be perverse, over the next few weeks I tried this experiment again several more times. The reaction was always the same: circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets. In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.
There is loads here in the article to discuss. I will return to it shortly and in the meantime you may want to share your thoughts?
Quickest way to turn one mother against another? Start talking about breastfeeding in terms of “should’, “ought” and “must”.
I breastfed my son for 12 months and my daughter is nearly 2 1/2 and still nursing. I went through a “rabid” stage regarding breastfeeding, more so because I felt like a lot of people were devaluing what I wanted to do and the time period I hoped to do it over. So I swotted up on all the stats etc and could quote them at will. And yes, it shut up a lot of my detractors. But at the same time, being part of the more “enthusiastic” nursing crowd made me feel bad. Previously I had always been a “it’s the mother’s choice” person. Now I was associating with a group that was more along the lines of “it’s the mother’s duty”. I felt like that was detracting from my feminist perspective of women should have a choice regarding what they do with their own bodies. I was torn. And so I did (and do) what I see as being right for me and my child, and I try to support other women in doing what they see as right for them and their child. I am all for supporting, educating and enabling women to breastfeed if that is what they want. I do think a lot of women might choose to nurse or nurse longer if they knew more about it and were supported more. But I also think that ultimately, it is up to the individual mother. And if makes me a “bad” booby lady then so be it…
I think there are lots of parenting choices like this – breastfeeding just being the most stark – where defending your own choice means implicitly criticising someone else’s, if it is different. It is very hard to sit and listen to someone say how wonderful whatever it is they did was, if you did the exact opposite.
For most parents, when you’re in it, parenting choices seem far more important than any other decision you’ve ever made (like where to live, or what career to have, which are also about your own preferences, not someone else’s future). So someone else’s choices, particularly early on when you’re not sure of yourself, seem really threatening.
Or maybe I’m just projecting my own views at the time?
Anyway, I never felt especially worried about the breastfeeding conversations, probably because it worked out reasonably well for me, and I knew I’d done everything I wanted to do, but I used to dread the sleeping/attachment parenting/ controlled crying conversations, because I knew that my choices were described on many parenting websites in ways that were pretty threatening to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article as well. The section that really interests me is where she questions the position that breastfeeding is free. Because breastfeeding can be more time-consuming than the alternative and because it needs to be done by the mother, it is clearly only free if we do not assign a value to the mother’s time. I disagree with Rosin’s position that breastfeeding is only maybe a little bit better than formula but I think that it’s important to have a continuing dialogue about this from a feminist perspective and that includes wondering aloud about whether heavy promotion of breastfeeding, from some angles, is another way of making women/mothers shut up and do their duty. I happen to think it’s a lot more complex than that, and I believe that we should take the opposite position to Rosin and go all-out lactivist – breastfeeding is valuable and is good for mother as well as baby and therefore social structures should accommodate it in such a way that women are not disadvantaged for having breasts – in this sense as in every other.
Hmmm…. I’ve done both. I breast fed my elder daughter for a year, then stopped because we were going back on the fertility treatment treadmill again, but I only managed to breast feed my younger daughters for about 10 days. I have only one working breast because I have had some benign lumps removed from the other, including one from under the nipple. Fine with just one baby, but very difficult with twins. Plus there were other issues. Whatever. I ended up bottle feeding my twins, with good quality formula, in clean, sterilised bottles, using boiled water from a very good water supply. In other words, standard first world conditions.
I felt very guilty about not being able to breast feed my twins. And yet, how silly! I really couldn’t feed them. And yet I felt as though I was a failure as a mother, and it took me months, maybe even years, to come to terms with it. I wasn’t meeting the correct standard of mothering.
So I can see the force of the argument in the article. That doesn’t mean that I buy the argument, lock, stock and bottle, but I can see that it is plausible.
There’s a lot in breastfeeding that makes it really challenging to unpack, I think.
On one hand, it’s just like a lot of the other issues you face in parenting. There is no cost-free solution to the everyday problems of feeding, caring, and educating – every solution is going to represent an expenditure of physical or emotional resources. Every reasonable choice has benefits and every reasonable choice has costs. Each person in his or her own situation places a different value on each benefit and cost, which is why we make different choices.
If you breastfeed, you are doing so at the cost of not being able to share the labor of feeding. If you bottle-feed, you are doing so at the cost of fears about its naturalness (and the associated health fears that are raised both due to the history of formula and the general specter of artificiality.) When the child is older, you buy organic and cope with the financial cost and the time costs of preparation, or buy something more affordable or convenient and cope with the fear of health costs. Same thing with caring for the child and making decisions about the child’s education. Depending on your fears and your access to financial or human resources, you’ll weigh these things differently.
What makes things more complicated, though, is the notion that in order to be “good”, mothers are supposed to weigh fears for their children’s health more highly than any other cost. So if something may, in a more objective sense, represent a relatively marginal fear cost (like the health costs of bottlefeeding, which to the extent they exist are not on par with, say, feeding the child arsenic) mothers are supposed to weight it more heavily in their consideration of the cost-benefit trade-off. In order to be “good”, mothers are also supposed to value the benefit of their own relaxation/sleep time less than the average person. Breastfeeding, in that it costs “only” maternal time and provides the all-important health benefit, fits squarely in that intriguing space of decisions that can tell “good” mothers from “bad” ones.
Emily: I agree there’s a lot to unpack. To take things a step further, I often see the notions “Formula feeding mothers get more sleep” and “Bottle feeding is better for a mother’s mental health” taken as read in conversations about infant feeding. In fact, the only data we have on sleep suggests that, on average, breastfeeding mothers get more sleep (formula feeding mothers had around 40-45 minutes per night less sleep), and that mothers who formula feed are at greater risk of mental health problems. These data are potentially confounded, but they’re the best we have. Yet I don’t often see these formulations challenged in any meaningful way.
All infant care, including breastfeeding, has a cost – and to me, that means that society needs to work a whole lot harder not just to ameliorate that cost but to negate it; not that we need to work a whole lot harder to push a profit-generating cows-milk product onto families. The companies who make it are doing that just fine already, and really don’t need any help along the way.
Should each individual woman, on any given day, have a free choice about what to do with her breasts: this should be an obvious “yes”. (And anyone who reads my blog knows I believe that, strongly!) When you’re taking a wider viewpoint, a public policy viewpoint, starting from a place of talking about how breastfeeding is bad for mental health and robs mothers of sleep is tenuous at best, and downright incorrect and damaging at worst.
What always seems to get me steamed when the subject of breastfeeding comes up is the notion that it is a “free” choice to select either breast milk or formula. This choice, like most choices that have to do directly with the long-standing definition of “femininity,” is not “free” by any means. It is super-charged with meaning and loaded with judgment.
As I move farther down the path of parenthood, I am coming to be of the opinion that, until we all recognize that this choice is not simply one that the mother (or even both caregivers) are able to make freely and without immense social pressure on either side, we all lose.
To breastfeed is a STATEMENT. To formulafeed is a STATEMENT. Until this changes, we are all screwed in the court of public opinion no matter what we do in this arena.
I definitely think breastfeeding is better than formula feeding. Even if you want to argue the health/IQ studies, there’s still the financial and environmental factors.
But I think there are a LOT of choices mothers make and too much emphasis is put on the breastfeeding one.
I thought I was so great because I breastfed my toddler. Meanwhile we ate at McDonalds at least once a week. It was ridiculous.
If a mother can breastfeed and makes that choice, GREAT!
But if a mother finds it painful and/or hates it, I think it’s best she should stop. I think they’re better off using formula. The benefits of the breast milk don’t outweigh the depression, resentment, and pain….in my opinion.
As for rejection in playgroups. It happens to all of us. If you announce you’re going to stop breastfeeding after a month, you’re going to get weird looks. You might be rejected. The same thing will happen if you announce you’re going to breastfeed your baby for his second year.
I think it’s all about respecting other people’s choices. And understanding MANY factors go into being a healthy and happy family. None of us are going to succeed in all of them. So to judge mothers based on one factor (breastfeeding) is really unfair.
I think this article had heaps of interesting things to say. Pity about her brittle authorial voice, I felt instantly positioned as belonging to the axis of evil breastfeeding, organic food slinging mothers, so that any criticisms I had of her methodology could be instantly dismissed on those grounds.
I breastfed my girls and wouldn’t have it any other way. For me it was a lifestyle decision, and for my lifestyle the easiest way for me to parent.
I think there’s an edge here. On the one hand I don’t give a shit what any individual does. On the other hand I think the message does need to be out there that breastfeeding is a superior choice to formula (even she admits that in the article), or the conditions under which women breastfeed will never be improved.
By the way I disagree that breastfeeding instantly renders a household unequal. Our household is equal and the work is shared but it’s not like we do 50% of everything. I cook more. Martin does the bulk of the cleaning. I got up to the babies, Martin got up to the big kids. It would be just silly to expect that he would vacuum 50% of the house and I would vacuum the other 50%. Everyone has a role to play. Just because some of those roles are biologically assigned doesn’t instantly have to make them unfairly distributed. It might suck sometimes that Dad can’t get a tit out, but then it might suck for him sometimes that I outright refuse to vacuum because its bad for the pelvic floor.
Having said all that, I was intrigued by her fundamental position and I think it is an essential part of the dialogue.
Being that I don’t fit into any real “club”…I couldn’t breastfeed, wasn’t married, and I’m still not…I can offer only a little…I desperately wanted to breastfeed. My daughter would not, in spite of EVERYTHING I did to make it happen in my mess of postpartum afterwards. Sadly, I have felt like I have not been welcomed into certain groups of moms…but I feel like that has had everything to do with not having a man and not much to do with the breastfeeding thing. But I live in Staten Island, New York- so, I don’t know if that counts.
Cyndy,
I think location can have a huge influence on the situation.
I live in Fort Worth, Texas and formula-feeding is the norm here. I would go to these mommy-meetings sponsored by the local hospital. I think I was the only parent breastfeeding. All the other parents had bottles. Although some bottles might have been filled with breast milk. Even then though, the norm was NOT to whip out your breast. I rarely see moms breastfeeding in public here, and if they do they cover themselves up with a blanket.
I think it would be very unusual for a mom here to be rejected for bottle-feeding….well, unless she hung out at La Leche meetings.
But in other places, I’m sure the opposite occurs. I’m sure there are places where you get dirty looks as soon as you take out that bottle.
I was irritated by the equality argument. It does turn out, for a lot of families, in the context of one stay at home parent and one work out of the home parent, that the stay at home woman does most of the housework and organising of family life. But it isn’t a given. It isn’t essential that breastfeeding mothers do vacuuming and cooking, it works out that way because our systems of work are stupid, and because we grew up in families where fathers became magically incompetent as soon as they got home. Breastfeeding isn’t the problem. Bottle-feeding mothers also do most of the housework, and for that matter, most of the baby-feeding. Making your relationship equal, and showing your children that women and men are both capable of nurturing and cleaning, is hard work because you’re fighting all of your own conditioning and our whole society and economy. I did the breastfeeding, he did the “you don’t need to feed during the night anymore” re-settling. He gets up first most mornings and has breakfast with the kid, and does most of the putting to bed at night. I do pretty much all of the stuff in between, while he earns us a living.
The other bit that annoyed me was the assumption that you can’t really do anything else while you’re breastfeeding. But I had a baby who fed quite a bit more than her figure of half an hour per feed x nine. Custommademilk rejected those figures pointing out that babies feed less frequently and for shorter periods as they get older. Which for a lot of people is true, but it’s also irrelevant. Some babies feed a lot. Feeding my baby in the first four to five months was a ten to twelve hour a day proposition. I still think it was worth it, but I didn’t have to go out to paid work (I did work from home, with my mother looking after the baby, and took breaks for feeding). Having a baby who wanted to breastfeed pretty much all the time made it particularly obvious to me that breastfeeding didn’t have to be a discreet task, undertaken while sitting down at home. I have breastfed to the tune of “I’ve been everywhere man”. We need to support women to breastfeed while they do what they need to do, and talk about how you can do things differently, but still do them. Not just hand ’em a bottle, as if that will fix everything. Because bottle fed babies also like to be carried and cuddled, and they have sooky grizzly times that make their mothers wonder how anyone gets anything done with a baby around.
Have also been trying to find the time to write a post about this. It is just screaming for it.
Shall read yours with interest.
There was a lot happening in that article.
One thing that I think that she was trying to do was reject the ‘competimummy’ thing that seems to happen in some mothers circles (the type of thing that ‘Best Parent Ever’ satires so well) of which breastfeeding can be a major factor.
She also seemed to be speaking out against the pressure that mothers feel to get it perfect and the intense scrutiny of their every decision. Which is the propaganda message of books like ‘What to expect when your expecting’ – all that patronising stuff about only ever doing what best for your baby. That attitude that mothers should only ever do what best for baby is used against women and I agree with Rosin about being wary of it. We do not live in an ideal world where we can all do what’s best for baby. Some of us have to work while pregnant, – some long hours in less than ideal conditions – some women can’t hold anything down but greasy ‘bad’ food due to morning sickness, some women can’t breastfeed and some don’t want to. I see the current climate of adulation of motherhood as retrograde and dangerous for women (and theres a heap of consumerism tied into it). Culture should value and respect women, mothers and children, but not in this idealising way. The way that motherhood is idealised holds all mothers to impossible ideals and women are judged on the choices that they make (without any analysis of why some mother don’t have access to the good choices), and then ‘bad’ mothers are demonised instead of being supported.
If motherhood were properly valued there would be kid friendly spaces and proper education and family friendly work places (and a whole of other stuff I’ve missed) that would make parenting easier on everyone (including changing societal norms about mens involvement so that people who share parenting responsibilities aren’t swimming upstream).
The above seems to be a part of what Rosin is saying but I do disagree with her on a couple of points, she WAAAAY to easy on the formula companies, real harm was done and it is simplistic to just blame the mothers for using bad water/rationing. Also as Penni and Kate noted her equality argument a bit dodge. Breastfeeding does not necessarily start you down a slippery slope of mother does all/ most of the parenting. It takes work and commitment but it certainly doesn’t have to be like that. A child needs parenting for more than just the time for which they breast feed and there are many ways that partners can be involved with nurturing their children.
Like pretty much anyone likely to read your blog, I know breastfeeding is best for a baby. For how long and how the cost benefits play out past 6 months is very unclear to me (despite having read a great deal of literature), but I absolutely support breastfeeding in public, to any age (OK, there has to a point at which it’s weird, but I have no evidence that actually ever happens).
But because of the shoulds, because of the “Don’t feed your child this evil formula before asking a doctor” labels (Oh, how they make my blood boil), I have always felt under assault by the breastfeeding proponents. I know it isn’t intentional. But as other people have said, parenting is so loaded. Choices I make affect them. Bad choices are *bad*. Only breastfeeding my second child to 4 months (one month of which was supplemented with formula) gets re-cast in my mind as my being co-erced by formula companies.
And yet I looked at the baby facilities in Hong Kong which provide bottle warmers but nowhere to breastfeed and I was critical. I saw no other woman breastfeeding when I was in Hong Kong (and kid 2 was less than 3 months, so I was). I was dismissive and judgmental towards them as a group of mothers. This rating of value as a mother is insidious. Apparently we can’t find a middle ground. A genuine understanding of cost benefit and how those magnitudes relate to other issues is missing. Culturally imposed choices will rarely result in the optimal outcome. But it would be useful to know what the cost of thinking “Christ I hate this” 5 – 8 times a day is compared with formula. Equivalently, it would be useful to know what breastfeeding rates would be if it was culturally routine to breastfeed anywhere, including work places. Much like assisted reproduction – most people get their babies the traditional way, but for those for whom that isn’t successful, there are other options. Formula = fertility treatment. 🙂
@Ariane: I’m sure your last comment was meant semi-in-jest (hence the smiley), but I’d just like to point out for the record that your analogy is false.
Formulafeeding is not only available to those who can’t breastfeed. It is a valid alternative for all parents.
For your analogy to hold water, people who didn’t want to have sex but still wanted to have children should be encouraged to consider fertility treatments as an alternative.
I don’t know, though. Maybe that _is_ what you meant.
Please allow me to add that I was assuming a heteronormative couple who “didn’t want to have sex” in my comment.
There are, of course, many same-sex couples in related situations who too should not be denied the right to access any and all reproductive technologies.
@Atiton: I really meant that the attitude towards formula should be the same as the attitude towards fertility treatment, that the former should change to be like the latter. Not the other way around. In other words, people shouldn’t look to formula unless they need it (and mothers get to decide if they need it, not random punters), but if they do it shouldn’t be regarded as a Bad Thing. I feel the same way about c-section. Don’t have one unless you have to, but thank the gods it is an option if you need it.
I realise the actual quasi equation didn’t have the element that it was something I thought *should* be the case, rather than a statement of what is. Although the sentence before it did. Still, comparing the use of formula to wanting to have a baby without having sex is pretty much exactly what makes me feel defensive and unwilling to align myself with the pro-breastfeeding stance.
Something I keep thinking about is how these internet discussions play out in a totally geography-free, context-free zone. I mean, I’m living in Maine in the US. Among the mothers I know, formula feeding is the devil. It just is. My lactation consultant (and in my set, everyone had at least one lactation consultant) told me that giving my child a bottle was akin to letting him play in traffic. I had to get over some stigma in getting to being okay with bottle feeding.
I have no doubt that my experience is not applicable to everyone – it is specific to my own economic, social and geographic context. I no doubt share it with some people and not with others. As Ariane points out, some mothers in Hong Kong may be subject to different kinds of pressures. From what lauredhel says, it seems like she or someone she knows may have experienced a negative workplace response to her efforts to breastfeed.
Without knowing what a mother’s context is, you have no way of knowing what pressures she’s been subject to and what she’s already considered in making her choice. So to assert that someone has definitely experienced some negative social messages (breastfeeding is bad! formula-feeding is bad!) and that those messages have wholly determined her choice is to impose on her autonomy, to take away her agency, in a significant way. That’s not to say that there aren’t structural issues that influence choice, of course (the availability of pumping stations and pumping breaks, or what have you.) But to entirely conflate maternal choices with the availability of pumping breaks — I see that as another way of overlooking individual maternal agency.
I have three children. I breastfed the first two until they were over 12 months old. I admit it, I was smug. I had struggled through three bouts of mastitis to feed the first and somehow thought that I deserved a badge of honour for doing so. My experience made me believe that women who weren’t breastfeeding just weren’t trying hard enough. (I’m ashamed of that belief now.)
I fed my second child easily. It was a joy. I felt compelled to share my joy with others and pushed the breastfeeding barrow whenever I could.
I fed my third child for six weeks until my milk supply dried up due to a medical condition. I wanted to feed but I couldn’t. I felt guilty and was depressed about changing to formula but I had no choice. Other mothers only reinforced my feelings of failure. I was treated like a pariah. Other mothers talked loudly in my presence about how they would never consider bottle feeding no matter what. I was treated to horrified looks and lectures on *breast is best*.
Not once did any breastfeeding mother ask me about my choice to bottle feed.
I’m sad that my son missed out on being breastfed, but I am glad that I had the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be on the *other side*. When I breastfed I never openly criticised bottle feeding mothers, but in my mind, and probably in my actions, I rejected them. I’m sorry for that now. Mothering is hard enough without being criticised by your peers.
Reading this over it occurs to me that the same discussion could take place about c-section vs natural birth (Ariane conjured this) and control crying vs co-sleeping.
The thing about feeding – breast or bottle – is its performance factor. It’s a public signifier of your whole body of parenting work – past present and future. If you HAVE to bottlefeed because for medical reasons it’s a false signifier, but no one actually cares about that. It’s a cultural signifier, binary in its dual nature, loaded with all sorts of layers that suggest geography, class, education, philosophy…it implies certain other parenting values – formula feeding is aligned with control crying, c-sections and other interventionist styles of parenting, which of course extends to discipline, the way you feel about your child…all complete bullshit of course. Breastfeeding is aligned with co-sleeping or gentle resettling, natural birth, redirecting instead of disciplining etc (again all utter bullshit). Even the binary nature is obviously false and misleading (leading someone to think that if they give their baby even one serve of formula they are no longer ‘exclusive’ and of course all the best people are ‘exclusive’).
Parenting of course is not a fluid continuum, not one single choice between A or B made when the sperm ignites the egg, but a series of choices, made and broken every day, an infinity of tiny decisions (some in our hands, some made for us), false starts, mistakes, course changes, new world orders, new new world orders to replace the old world order of five minutes ago that’s so clearly out of date or unworkable, and the strategies that simply get us through each day, or this next five minutes.
To that end its interesting that Hanna Rosin doesn’t find it liberating that she combines formula and breastfeeding, in effect exploding the binaries…instead those binaries struggle to reinforce themselves, even in her psyche.
[…] 24, 2009 in Uncategorized So Bluemilk pointed to this incendiary article by Hanna Rosin. Lots of people have responded to the substance […]
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Finally posted about the article, but really didn’t take the time to deal with the competitive parenting/perfect mother/always being judged part that is really central to her argument… Instead I got carried away with my criticisms (due to being in a rush). Might have to tackle it again some day with more of a reference to all that stuff.
http://nopod.blogspot.com/2009/03/real-boys-play-with-dolls-and-that.html
BTW, great point Penni. I haven’t thought about it quite that way before, but there is a lot of that all or nothing stuff. I think it is part of our constant tendency to want to clearly define ourselves – pigeon-hole ourselves, sometimes – in order to be clear about which ‘group’ we belong to. Of course, then once you throw your lot in with a particular group their influence and the unwritten rules of the group become self-reinforcing too…
[…] is promoted to women. Is the breastfeeding ‘message’ heavy-handed? Yes. Is there a hurtful judgemental attitude towards mothers who bottle-feed? […]
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