Bottled Up. Suzanne Barston
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and have insisted that their feelings are invalid, merely the result of formula marketing rather than legitimate concerns about body and autonomy.
The title of chapter 5—“Damn Lies and Statistics”—alludes to the specific, biased, and often sensationalized information the public receives about breastfeeding. I question why certain studies have been so markedly overstated and others attacked or ignored, and I explain how breastfeeding research is rooted in circular logic and confounded observation rather than controlled studies or facts. A poor understanding of relative risk has caused us to view infant feeding as a key way to protect our children from harm and “maximize” their potential; it is no longer a question of whether breast is better, but whether formula will do irreparable damage. This overwhelmingly antiformula mind-set has ruled out the possibility of creating better options for the children of those who cannot (or choose not to) breastfeed—ironic, considering that we claim to be promoting breastfeeding as a means of improving child health.
Finally, in the sixth chapter, “Soothing the Savage Breast,” I suggest how those involved in breastfeeding advocacy should reassess their goals and approach. The way breastfeeding is currently promoted and instructed ignores fundamental inequities in the daily lives of women in many parts of the world, and even within our own country. Breastfeeding needs to be promoted and protected, but so does the choice to feed our babies in the way that works for us on an individual level. Infant feeding’s dark past cannot justify creating a similarly dark future, where women are forced, whether through emotional coercion, peer pressure, or political means, to breastfeed to the detriment of their own physical or emotional health.
To be clear: this is not an anti-breastfeeding book. I think breastfeeding is an amazing thing, and I’ve seen it work very well for many of my friends. But this book is not for people who are trying to breastfeed—there’s already a plethora of great books on that subject, and more to come, I’m sure. This book is for the parents who wanted to breastfeed and couldn’t; women who are conflicted about nursing and want to make a truly informed decision about what to do with their bodies; breast-feeding advocates and care providers who are willing to listen to the myriad reasons that women may choose not to nurse; and for people who are curious about the other side of this worldwide baby-feeding frenzy.
Mostly, though, this book is for the woman who is in tears, with cracked nipples and a screaming baby whom she can’t mother because she is constantly hooked up to a pump, who wants so badly to quit breastfeeding and finds nothing but fear-and-guilt-inducing literature everywhere she turns. I hope that this book will help her understand not only the science informing the prescriptive advice in the infant-feeding wars but, more important, the context in which the research is undertaken, so that she can make a truly informed decision. I hope she will be able to find this book, buried somewhere among the seven thousand books about breastfeeding on the parenting shelves, so that this woman will have a legitimate choice. I hope that it will speak for her and others like her, a group that has been all but ignored in the ongoing, often one-sided conversation about infant feeding. I hope this book will help her sit beside her breastfeeding friends, free from insecurity and judgment. I hope that it can inform a discussion which ultimately allows all women to feed their babies with pride, whether they are nourishing their babies from their breasts or from a bottle held in their hands, and that, ultimately, all women will have the freedom to find their own formula for good mothering.
ONE
Preconceived Notions
After years of hitting the bottle, America has fallen in love with lactation. Breastfeeding rates are the highest they’ve been in two decades: by the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, a whopping 75 percent of new mothers in the United States are nursing their babies when they leave the maternity ward.1 The credit goes partly to the researchers whose studies have shown a myriad of benefits to human milk, and partly to activists who have fought admirably for better pumping rights and hospital policies, doggedly working to make breastfeeding the norm. But the real heroics of the breast-is-best revolution happen not in government buildings or laboratories but rather in online chat rooms, playgroups, and prenatal classes, in the pages of parenting magazines, and in the headlines of daily news feeds. Fear of being less-than is a forceful motivator, and these days, women who do not breastfeed are portrayed as lacking—lacking in education and support; lacking in drive; and, in the harshest light, lacking in the most fundamental maternal instinct. From social media to public service messages and an overwhelming societal bias in favor of breast-feeding, mothers hear the message loud and clear: breastfeed or bust.
More than a decade ago, writer Tracey Thompson coined the term mommy wars, a “shorthand for the cultural and emotional battle zone we land in the minute we become mothers.”2 Thompson’s war was between working and stay-at-home moms, and I certainly witnessed this struggle within my own family—my mom stayed at home, my aunt was a successful professional, and there was a constant stream of subtle barbs about who’d made the superior choice. But although I can vaguely remember some discussion of work versus motherhood in my young adult social circles, it was only on the periphery. The whole mommy war phenomenon seemed dated, something left over from the early 1990s. Like grunge music, or flannel.
Flannel has recently come back in style, though, and so have the mommy wars. But while the fight looks the same, this war is fought on a very different front. A literal front, actually: those two structures protruding from our female bodies, otherwise known as our mammary glands. This battle is over our breasts, and it is causing significant carnage.
While pregnant with my first child, I was aware of the breast-versus-bottle controversy on a peripheral level, as if it were a war waged in some far-off country. I looked at formula from an unemotional place because I didn’t foresee it having any real impact on my life. I’d read study after study extolling the many virtues of breastmilk, and I was entirely convinced that it was the only choice for my son. He’d had such a rough start—my body hadn’t done such a bang-up job of nurturing him internally, and he was born with the ominous label of “growth restricted”—so it was the least I could do to feed him liquid gold, as the books called it, from my breast once he was on the outside.
I knew there could be problems. I’d read about latching issues, insufficient milk supply, fussy eaters … but nobody I knew in real life had actually complained about these things. Also—and I’m not proud of this—I had a theory that many breastfeeding “problems” were a result of women waiting too long to have kids; that we were a selfish generation and that my peers would just give up too easily, at the first sign of trouble; that we couldn’t be bothered in the first place.
My husband, Steve, had a family friend who was due around the same time I was, putting us in the awkward spot of being constantly compared to each other in every way, shape, and form (especially shape and form—this woman had gained only twenty pounds during her entire pregnancy and had taught aerobics up until her due date; I had packed on more than thirty-five pounds and sat on my couch writing and napping for most of the nine months). But she had made it clear that she wasn’t planning to nurse, that she might pump for a few months, but no more than three, and certainly no actual “breast”-feeding. She may have won at being the better pregnant person, I silently scoffed, but I was already beating her at being the better mother.
This wasn’t just naiveté. It was judgmental, holier-than-thou ignorance. I was an unknowing foot soldier in a new mommy war, one with a strong and ever-growing army. To be part of the breastfeeding infantry, it doesn’t matter if you’re planning to work full-time or be a stay-at-home-mom, if you’re gay or straight, if you’re a card-carrying left-wing feminist or a Mormon with a penchant for traditional values. Instead, the battle lines are drawn mostly by class, and often by race, but perhaps most painfully between those who succeed and those who “fail.”
• • •
If raising a baby takes a village, then we’re screwed. These days, when a woman is expecting and wondering what to expect, she will seldom turn to a book, her doctor, her mother, or even a friend. The closest