How ‘lactivists’ turned breastfeeding into a moral crusade
U of T professor Courtney Jung delves into the movement that made formula feeding a source of shame for new mothers
Courtney Jung, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, considers the history, science and politics of breastfeeding in her new book, Lactivism. Decades of activism have turned breastfeeding into a pillar of public health policy and a shibboleth of good parenting, she writes, though recent research has cast doubt on many of its purported benefits. In this excerpt, she writes about her early encounters with the thorny politics of 21stcentury motherhood.
The truth is I barely thought about breastfeeding until I was 39 years old and pregnant with my first child. I was surprised, delighted — and overwhelmed. I had spent almost 20 years working hard in jobs I loved, with almost complete freedom. I worked when I wanted to, which for me was pretty much all the time; I travelled; I hung out with my friends. As a graduate student and then an assistant professor, I didn’t have much in the way of luxury goods, but I was luxuriously independent.
Of course, none of this prepared me for life as a pregnant woman or new mother at all. Never once had I considered what my parenting philosophy would be, or whether I would have one. Not only did I not know what the options were, I had no idea that the routines and practices of the parents I knew were part of something as coherent as a philosophy. Ferberizing? Co-sleeping? I hadn’t heard of either of them. Nor did I have any idea that my friend, who breastfed each of her kids for over two years and slept in the same bed with all three of them, was practising attachment parenting. I assumed she was practising birth control.
I had a lot to learn. Luckily for me, I was suddenly surrounded by women — friends, colleagues, acquaintances — with information and opinions they were eager to share. As I got more visibly pregnant, even women I didn’t know were keen to share. I began to think of my expanding belly as a portal to a parallel universe. And in that parallel universe, breastfeeding was not only away to feed a baby, as I had assumed before I got pregnant. It was a calling, a mission, an expression of one’s deepest commitments, and a measure of one’s moral worth. It wasn’t just something a woman might do; it was something she believed in and even preached.
I was introduced to this sense of calling one evening at a cocktail party when I was about five months pregnant. As I looked around the room at the many people I knew, all happily sipping their pink cosmopolitans, I felt a little light-headed and unsteady, and it didn’t help that I was stone cold sober. I really wanted to go home, but it was 7 o’clock. I’d just arrived. When I saw a woman heading toward me, I welcomed the distraction. I knew her only slightly, from parties just like this one. She congratulated me on being pregnant, and I had the impression she was taking me under her wing in a maternal sort of way. But it soon became clear that she was on a serious mission to make sure that I would breastfeed my baby.
She told me how important breastfeeding was for mother-child bonding and about its many medical benefits. She told me, too, about how disappointing it was that so many African American women were still not breastfeeding. I responded in what I imagined to be a reassuring manner. “Yes, well, I’ll probably breastfeed.” But obviously I wasn’t reassuring enough because she kept on talking.
I picture that evening now as an awkward tango, with me repeatedly stepping backward, in retreat, while she kept advancing, all the while gesticulating dramatically with her cosmopolitan. This unlikely pas de deux stopped only when we quite literally hit a wall. We were in a corner of the yellow wallpapered kitchen with no other guests in sight. I remember thinking, “What is she doing?” I couldn’t fathom why she cared so passionately about how I fed my baby. But her lecture got me thinking. Why does breastfeeding carry so much moral weight, and how much of that weight is just baggage? Are we, as mothers and as a society, investing too much in breastfeeding? And, if so, why? Even before my baby was born, encounters like the one I had at that cocktail party exposed a righteousness that made me uneasy.
Still, I breastfed my daughter. Why? Because even though I didn’t want to embrace breastfeeding as an identity, or cling to it as a religion, I did want to do everything in my power to keep my baby healthy and safe. At that point I believed, as I had been told, that the medical benefits associated with breastfeeding were significant. In the end, that’s all that mattered. I would breastfeed my daughter — I just wouldn’t let my decision become a moral crusade. I thought of breastfeeding as a personal choice. I was a woman who happened to breastfeed and who believed in its benefits. But I was not a lactivist. I didn’t think that everyone else in the world should necessarily breastfeed their babies too.
As it turned out, breastfeeding was easy for me. My tiny daughter latched like a pro, so it was also the path of least resistance — even more so when she began eating solids but still flatly refused a bottle. For months I ran home from work to feed my baby in the middle of the day, unbuttoning and rebuttoning my shirt so often I was never sure I was completely dressed. Would I say this was a good plan? No. Was it a plan at all? No, again. But unlike me, my daughter had very strong feelings about breastfeeding and a much stronger will. By the time she was 2 years old, and I had slowed down to a few feedings in the morning and night, breastfeeding was primarily a crutch to comfort her, to calm her, to get her to sleep and back to sleep. Of course that meant I was the only one who could do those things, but by then, that ship had long since sailed.
One cool day in early spring, when my daughter was only a few months old, I had another eye-opening encounter, this time at my pediatrician’s office. As my daughter and I sat in the waiting room reading Goodnight Moon, another mother came in wearing her small baby in a sling on her chest. She looked tired and pale. When her baby started to fuss, she pulled out a bottle, sheepishly. And then she turned to me — a total stranger — to explain why she was bottle-feeding her baby.
It was a long story that started with an emergency premature birth and ended with her inability to produce enough milk — what medical professionals delicately call “lactation failure.” When the baby showed signs of dehydration, the pediatrician insisted she use formula. About halfway through, she started crying; by the end, she was sobbing.
I tried to say comforting, sympathetic things — about how healthy and happy the baby looked, how there’s nothing wrong with formula — but it didn’t help. She was inconsolable. The most I could do was try to distract my daughter when her insistent little fists started tugging on my shirt. I wasn’t about to add to this woman’s anguish by breastfeeding right in front of her. I felt guilty enough already. Somehow I’d won a prize that I blithely took for granted but that this woman desperately wanted.
That encounter in my pediatrician’s office stayed with me. It was the first time I realized how much shame and despair women can feel when they don’t breastfeed. Breastfeeding had been easy for me — not painless and not without frustration, doubt and embarrassment, but never truly difficult. And because I was lucky, I had escaped the moralizing lectures and public shaming that many non-breastfeeding mothers endure. Whether or not I was a true believer, I was “in” — beyond reproach, a good mother. My baby didn’t sleep through the night, I was working full-time, and we didn’t always read to her before bed. But at least I was breastfeeding!
A few years later, after I had stopped breastfeeding my daughter, I had to let go of that slim sense of accomplishment when I came across Hanna Rosin’s article about breastfeeding in the Atlantic. Rosin was breastfeeding her third child and growing a little fed up with the whole routine. One night she sat down to read the latest scientific and medical research on breastfeeding — something I had never thought to do — and was shocked to discover that “the actual health benefits of breastfeeding are surprisingly thin.”
The evidence for many of the most hyped benefits, like improving cognitive development, seemed mostly mixed and inconclusive, or the effects were modest. Rosin’s article shocked a lot of people, many of whom rushed to attack and dismiss her. But I found her article compelling. If she was even partly right, the zealotry surrounding breastfeeding was even more mystifying than I’d thought.
The final straw came a few months later when I happened to discover how WIC (a U.S. federal program that provides benefits for low-income mothers) promotes breastfeeding. I was telling a graduate student in my department about my encounter with the anguished woman in the pediatrician’s waiting room and wondering aloud about the emo- tional freight attached to breastfeeding. My graduate student, Emily, a new mother herself, chimed in immediately. “Yeah, what really surprised me is how WIC gives breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding mothers different benefits.” At first, I thought I had misheard. But I hadn’t. As a graduate student whose partner was unemployed, Emily’s family qualified for the WIC supplemental food program when their baby was born. And because her partner was breastfeeding, she was eligible for all of the perks WIC offers breastfeeding mothers, including qualifying for benefits for twice as long as non-breastfeeding mothers and receiving better food options.
Until that moment, I had assumed that the breastfeeding imperative was pernicious mostly because it made mothers who don’t breastfeed feel guilty. I didn’t think they should be made to feel guilty, nor did I think mothers like me, who did breastfeed, had any right to feel smug. Still, I shrugged off those bad dynamics as an unavoidable aspect of parenting, another example of the so-called mommy wars — the vicious disagreements parents sometimes have about child-rearing.
But if the U.S. government was effectively punishing poor mothers who didn’t breastfeed, and their babies too, then the stakes were much higher than I had imagined. And if Rosin was right in saying that there wasn’t much benefit to breastfeeding after all, then the government’s punitive approach to women who don’t breastfeed was shocking.
Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin was shocked to discover that “the actual health benefits of breastfeeding are surprisingly thin”
Excerpted from Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy, by Courtney Jung. Available from Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015.