The ‘Lactivist’ Cult
Breast-pests: Give it a rest!
‘SO, you’re going to breastfeed this new baby?” asked my brother, five years my junior and without kids of his own, about my 1weekold.
I have three children and, despite our close relationship, my only sibling had never before asked by what method I planned to keep my kids alive.
“Yes, why?” I answered. “I don’t know, I just keep hearing people ask you that,” he said. “Why do people keep asking you that?” Why, indeed. He was right. Nearly everyone I had encountered since having the baby has asked me how I planned to feed my children. He wasn’t curious so much as thinking he was
supposed to be curious, so he’d better act curious. That curiosity and courtesy were interchangeable in this context.
My brother wasn’t being nosy, in other words, or inappropriate. He was picking up on cultural cues: Whether or not to breast feed has turned into a perfectly acceptable question to ask new mothers and a litmus test to judge them — a nasty combination.
Something had happened in the nearly three years since my last child was born: Breastfeeding has become a lifestyle, an obsession and an identity.
What used to be a conversation on feeding that I would have to commiserate with other moms has become a conversation I have with friends, acquaintances and the general population at large. People unironically use the word “lactivist” to describe themselves. The world has gone mad. It goes beyond nosiness and into something resembling an enforcement squad for breastfeeding. People ask and expect the answer to be a dutiful “of course I will be breastfeeding my baby. Breast is best!”
When your answer is anything else — say, that your husband will be administering one bottle of formula so you can sleep more than two or three hours at a clip — you get a furrowed brow and a look of concern from people who have no reason to care about you or your children.
There seems to be a constant barrage of studies out of the scientific community on breastfeeding. Breastfed babies are said to have a higher IQ , fewer allergies, are faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. When the studies are later reversed, as they often are, much less attention is paid.
Because few, if any, of these studies are done on siblings, where one has been breastfed and one hasn’t, in order to control for family health history, household income and other factors, it’s very difficult to tell what amazing benefits breastfeeding really has.
Ultimately, it’s not that breast milk has magical properties; it’s that a mother who commits to exclusively breastfeeding for six months or more is likely a mother who also commits to reading to her child regularly or following up on schoolwork or just gener ally being a more involved parent. This involvement is what leads to a higher IQ.
As for allergies, in 2008 the American Academy of Pediatrics found that breastfeeding may help prevent allergies, but only in children considered “highrisk” and only in the shortterm. There is no potion to ensure your child never develops allergies, much as we’d like to imagine there to be. And any way, it isn’t breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding is great. It’s free, it’s easier than fussing with bottles, it can go a long way toward fostering a bond between mother and baby and many women find it helps with losing the baby weight.
But it isn’t some special elixir for smart, healthy children. Its elevated place in our current culture has resulted in shame toward the moms who can’t, or choose not to, nurse their babies.
And that’s deeply unfortunate. Formula isn’t the devil. In fact, formula is one of the greatest inventions in modern history and should garner deeper appreciation from us all.
Before formula, a mother who could not, for whatever reason, breastfeed risked having her baby die from malnutrition or was at the whim of a wet nurse to feed her baby.
Formula has given women freedom and peace of mind. Using it shouldn’t lead to meddling from wellmeaning strangers. Maybe wellmeaning strangers should mind their own business anyway.