Bottled Up. Suzanne Barston
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all this monitoring to make breastfeeding possible in the world we currently inhabit. In the same article, Wells asserts that “optimal breastfeeding as defined on a medical basis by WHO is neither ‘natural,’ ‘traditional’ or even, possibly, ‘normal’ in a species that has evolved to exploit ‘short-cuts’ in parent-offspring energy allocation.”11 Breastfeeding may still be the best way to feed babies nutritionally, but using the “breast is natural” argument while simultaneously insisting on the need for more medical research, expert intervention, and education hints at a different truth: maybe lactation is becoming an “unnatural” state in the society we live in.
“The propaganda tells us that breast feeding is ‘natural’ … that’s what the word ‘mammal’ means, for heaven’s sake. … We forget, of course, that while, as Homo sapiens, we still possess mammalian equipment, we are no longer repositories of mammalian instinct except in the most vestigial sense,” writes sociologist Susan Maushart in The Mask of Motherhood. “What our fellow mammals ‘know,’ we must learn. … Breast feeding is essentially a vestige of a hunter-gatherer way of life. The wonder is not that it grafts so poorly onto industrialized minds and bodies, but that we persist in trying to graft it at all.”12
Breastfeeding folklore invokes the past as evidence for the “naturalness” of nursing our young—“If breastfeeding were so hard, humans would have become extinct years ago”; “If every woman isn’t capable of breastfeeding, what did we do before formula existed?” What women who couldn’t breastfeed did before formula existed was rely on other women who were lactationally blessed; in tribal cultures, this was made possible by what anthropologists call “alloparenting,” a collaborative arrangement where it literally does take a village to raise a child.13 This is likely a foreign concept for those of us living in Western cultures. Many of us don’t live near family, and our friends are often busy with their own professional or family lives. Paternity leave is a rarity, so mothers are left on their own with infants pretty much right off the bat. This puts a lot of pressure on moms to iron out the feeding issues, pronto, even though most experts admit it takes up to six weeks to truly get the hang of breastfeeding. My friends whose families were local seemed to adjust better to both motherhood and nursing—even if there were technical complications in the beginning and even if their mothers were no help with the actual breastfeeding (another reason cited by breastfeeding advocates as a reason for lactation “failure” is that we aren’t getting guidance, and in some cases are receiving active resistance, from older generations)—than those of us essentially in the “orphan” camp. Having a screaming baby, bleeding nipples, and little to no sleep (all completely normal occurrences in the first weeks of motherhood) is one thing when you have a mom or sister there to help you through it; it’s another thing altogether when you’re in an empty house, alone with your fears, insecurities, and seemingly dysfunctional breasts.
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