collusion. The medical profession … [had] humanitarian concerns … and was also acting in response to mothers’ expressed needs. … They wanted freedom from the control biology extended over their lives, including pain-free, safe childbirth and birth control, and they saw medical science as an ally. … Breastfeeding failure was largely an unintended consequence, and it is likely that both working- and middle-class mothers were grateful to have a safe alternative.7
Regardless of why the medical model of infant feeding rose to prominence, by the late twentieth century most American women gave birth in hospitals and took advice from pediatricians about how to nourish and raise their infants. And this had some disturbing consequences. Women were often rendered unconscious during childbirth, for example; babies were relegated to nurseries rather than spending their first days in close contact with their parents; and, as Blum suggests, the confidence women had in their own bodies was typically undermined. The women’s health movement stemmed from the fertile soil of this cold, technological approach to motherhood, encouraging women to seek help from midwives and other more “natural,” antiestablishment care providers. Even today, the AAP and independent physicians are often portrayed as ignorant, “prounneCesarean”8 (performing unnecessary cesarean sections) and anti-breastfeeding, in cahoots with the formula industry to perpetuate the need for “artificial” feeding.
Grassroots lactivists struggle with the conflict between philosophy and necessity. They blame modern medicine for the advent of our formula-feeding culture, and our fast-paced lifestyle for the severing of familial ties that have essentially created a generation of women who’ve never really seen breastfeeding in action. But these constructs have also been the most useful tools in promoting breastfeeding. The loudest (and apparently most persuasive) arguments for breastfeeding come from respected medical organizations like the AAP and WHO. Scientific research has provided ample evidence to support the perceived need for militant lactivism, and the highly “unnatural” Internet has made it possible for this message to get across to the masses, even those in areas where physicians are not as up-to-date on breastfeeding science. “Breastfeeding advocates often are caught in the odd position of touting the biological advantages of breastfeeding while at the same time … criticiz[ing] medical practitioners for not knowing more about lactation and for providing false information to women,” states Bernice L. Hausman, one of the most respected scholarly breast-feeding advocates. And yet, “much of breastfeeding advocacy itself is indebted to a medical model of demonstrating the contribution that breastfeeding makes to health.”9 Contrary to the back-to-basics, mommy-gut mythology surrounding nursing, breastfeeding in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain is firmly rooted in this cold, blatantly medicalized version of parenthood. Jonathan Wells of England’s pro-breastfeeding MRC Childhood Nutrition Research Centre even argues that infant feeding is a profound example of biopower, “techniques [that] include normalizing judgments which subtly define the properness of an individual’s behaviour, the institutionalisation of knowledge through which individuals are objectified and devalued, and the ‘panoptic gaze’ which subjects individuals to continual surveillance.”10
Unfortunately, we might actually need 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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