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 thing our Internet-driven society has to a town square is Facebook. Confused or concerned? Simply punch any question into an Internet search box and voila—thousands of answers at your fingertips. Who needs a physician when there’s WebMD? Or friends when there are chat rooms?
The Internet hooks you from the start: women struggling to get pregnant find themselves lured by the siren song of TwoWeekWait.com, where they’ll be aided and abetted by others equally obsessed with having two lines pop up on a urinedrenched stick. Later, if you’re considering a home birth, you can hit up Mothering.com, where there are plenty of folks assuring you that this is indeed the safer, smarter option. On the message board I frequented while pregnant, women would post queries like “is this labor?” or “am I miscarrying?” prior to calling an actual MD. The danger in this, obviously, is that anyone with a keyboard can claim to be an expert; the World Wide Web has opened us up to a world of biased misinformation under the guise of “Web journalism.” The Internet is a physician, therapist, and best friend but also your worst enemy, a bad boyfriend who treats you like trash but then shows up with flowers and candy.
Google breastfeeding and you’ll find a minefield of information. In addition to articles supporting the vast superiority of breastmilk over formula, there is ample help for any nursing problem under the sun—breastfeeding after a reduction or implants; nursing your adopted child; even lactation for men (which, for the record, is indeed possible). But amidst the plethora of substantial, legitimate information, there is also a cacophony of foreboding, judgmental voices: “lactivist” blogs that compare formula feeding to child abuse; public message boards with calls to action—“I automatically feel sorry for the baby sitting in the cart in the formula aisle as their parent loads up on cans of the stuff. I feel like yelling ‘HOW CAN YOU DO THAT TO THE POOR CHILD!?’ ” says one poster on a Facebook breastfeeding group forum;3 diatribes from medical professionals and lactation consultants, using their professional credentials to validate staunch personal beliefs. Even a board dedicated to planning Disney World dream vacations devolves into a formula-versus-breastfeeding argument when a woman brings up the lack of nursing rooms in Frontierland.
When I first performed my own prenatal Internet search on infant feeding, I was surprised by the vitriol expressed in these lactivist websites toward formula feeders, but since the breast-feeders were in my prospective camp, I chose to ignore my sneaking suspicion that something was amiss. Plus, I admit that I possessed an embarrassingly classist view regarding formula. Better bonding, improved immunity, less chance of childhood obesity, higher IQ, reduced cancer risk—all this could be yours, simply by nursing. Knowing all this information was out there, I couldn’t believe there was anyone who didn’t breastfeed these days, other than uneducated teenage moms, those with uncompromising work situations, or those unfortunate women who were physically unable to do so (and according to what I had read on the La Leche League website, there were very few of these women out there—far fewer than the formula lobby and misinformed doctors would have us believe).
It was one thing if a legitimate medical reason, insensitive employer, or lack of education stopped a mom from nursing; but all things being equal, it seemed selfish not to breastfeed. I certainly didn’t think formula was poison; almost everyone I knew in my generation was formula fed, and we all survived. But as another poster on that Facebook forum lamented, if we had all been breastfed, “who knows how much better [we] could have been?”
In my former life, I was more than immune to peer pressure; rather, I would choose the “alternative” point of view just to differentiate myself. But when it came to motherhood, I was a simpering mess, just waiting for the cultural zeitgeist to sway me in a certain direction. Because when it came down to it, like Prissy in Gone with the Wind, I didn’t know much about birthing babies, and even less about raising them. If the smart, progressive moms were breastfeeding, then I would be breastfeeding too.
• • •
A few months before I gave birth, a package arrived at my door. It included a sample can of Similac formula and a ton of literature on breastfeeding.
My husband watched me open the package and raised his eyebrows when he saw its contents.
“Why did they send you that?” he asked. “We’re breastfeeding.”
It was a good question, with a rather convoluted answer. The International Code of Marketing Breastmilk Substitutes (known in lactivist circles as the “WHO Code”) prohibits formula companies from advertising in any conspicuous way: “There should be no advertising or other form of promotion to the general public of products within the scope of this Code,” proclaims article 5.1 of this policy, coauthored in 1981 by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).4
The creation of the WHO Code was inspired by events that caused the Nestlé company to begin to be associated with infant death rather than chocolaty goodness. The debacle began when Nestlé deployed “Mothercraft” nurses, dressed in white uniforms evocative of medical professionals, to assist new moms in the maternity wards of developing nations. The trouble was that these “Mothercraft nurses” were not nurses by any stretch of the imagination, and they liberally doled out formula along with infant-rearing advice.5 Mothers were encouraged to use formula under these false pretenses and sent home with free samples; their milk soon dried up, as did the formula freebies. Faced with limited financial resources and, in many cases, a contaminated water supply, babies were soon being fed with diluted bottles of disease-laced formula. This caused dehydration, malnutrition, and fatal cases of bacterial infections and gastroenteritis from the compromised water used to mix the formula; breastfeeding advocates claimed that up to ten million infant deaths could be attributed to the proliferation of infant formula use in developing nations. Physicians, religious leaders, and activists banded together to demand a boycott of Nestlé products worldwide and to encourage the promotion of breastfeeding as the safest and best form of infant feeding.6
The Nestlé controversy was integral to the resurgence of breastfeeding in Western societies, many of which had become primarily bottle-feeding cultures in recent decades. It not only revealed that formula companies were out for the bottom line and apparently had no concern for the infants they were claiming to nourish, but also led morally driven scientists and social activists to question the formula-accepting status quo. Within several years of the Nestlé disaster, WHO came out
