The Politics of Breastfeeding

Now this is radical politics. I read this book for the first time almost 12 years ago and it's still a compelling and fascinating read. It's really hard to have casual conversations about breastfeeding (and I don't mean in the obvious way!), because folks are conditioned to interpret criticism of companies as criticism of mothers who don't breastfeed. But consider an astounding fact: Most human beings in the history of the world have been breastfed and most human mothers have been able to breastfeed. What then accounts for the real, and horrible, difficulties women and babies in Westernized society have nusring? Note that formula is not the only or the obvious solution to women who are literally incapable, or just unwilling, to breastfeed. After all, look how much cow's milk we distribute, not to mention human blood. (Don't take this as anything near a full argument. Read the book instead.) Who really benefits from societal arrangements that make formula feeding a rational, sometimes the only, choice? Perhaps more importantly, who suffers? Certainly *not* the formula companies. An amusing, and insight-giving, quote from the book and one of my favorites.:

Imagine a young man embarking on his first attempt at sexual penetration. Ask him to set about the project in a special sex centre where there are 'experts' he has never met before, ready to supervise and tell him how it ought to be done. Presume that his partner is as inexperienced as himself and that he is asked if he is going to 'try and achieve an erection'. When he starts, a busy 'expert', who may never have personally experienced sexual relations, starts telling him how to do it and inspects his his body with a critical expression, prodding him and his partner in an insensitive manner. By the bed is an artificial penis, put there, as the young man is told, 'just in case you can't manage it. Many young men can't make it; it is not their fault, nature often fails.' Everyone knows how sensitive sexual partners must be in order to nurture the psyche, as well as the body, of the male, yet such sensitivity has been conspicuously absent form the milieu of hospitalised parturient women. There are thousands of horror stories of medical staff snapping at women, brusquely pushing the baby on to the breast, dragging her off and distributing the feeding bottles whose very presence is saying, 'You won't do it, you can't do it.' It is no wonder that, the world over, a decline in breastfeeding is linked with an increase in hospital births."

Fortunately, there's been some progress in a number of areas since this book came out. But the fundemental social structures which make breastfeeding, and other sane living practices, enormously difficult persist, indeed grow, largely unchecked and almost completely unquestioned. Can we say the corporate state?