to a place where you can’t utter the word breastfeeding in a negative context without serious backlash.
Before I left our interview, I asked Dr. Johnston about his own family’s experiences with breastfeeding. He told me that his wife had nursed their two daughters, but that her milk had never come in with their first child. “Our first kid didn’t get any milk, so at the end of a week he was underweight. We gave him formula, and the kid caught up,” he said casually as I gathered my things together.
“Oh, and that son now is a breastfeeding advocate. He works for UNICEF in Africa and does emergency nutrition. He got interviewed for Voice of America the other day about Breastfeeding Week.”
A champion of breastfeeding, sprung from the loins of the man whom Mothering Magazine accused of “dismissing breast-feeding advocates”?30 I can only imagine how Thanksgiving dinner went down at the Johnston household in 2003.
• • •
The ad industry certainly didn’t give birth to the concept of mother guilt. Advertising just capitalizes on feelings that are a natural part of motherhood. Mainstream breastfeeding advocacy has acknowledged the power of these emotions as a valuable tool for increasing breastfeeding rates—albeit in a quiet, underlying sort of way. Sociologist Elizabeth Murphy has argued that government breastfeeding policy in the United Kingdom has relied on a sort of “quiet coercion,” a phenomenon quite similar to what is happening here, on the other side of the pond. “Forcing women to breast feed would be unthinkable as an illegitimate incursion into the privacy of family life and an assault on mothers’ autonomy and self-determination,” Murphy suggests. Instead, by promoting breastfeeding as a way to better the health of the nation, the government encourages us to think and behave in certain ways, and to judge others accordingly; in effect, we are policing ourselves. “While experts are not, in the end, able to control how mothers feed their babies, they do set the standards by which women may be judged by others and, perhaps most importantly, judge themselves.”31 (The late Frank Oski, M.D., perhaps the most prominent physician breastfeeding advocate of the twentieth century, once alluded to this same useful tactic, stating that “if the truth makes mothers feel guilty and they develop some anxiety, perhaps the discomfort will tip the scales in favor of breastfeeding.”)32
Murphy’s theory might explain why being pregnant is tantamount to wearing a “kick me” sign on your back—or, rather, a “give me your unsolicited opinion” sign. That big belly gives strangers the license to weigh in on a number of things that seem entirely irrelevant to anyone other than you and your gestating fetus, and breastfeeding tops that list. One of my clients asked me in the midst of an eight-person meeting if I had started “toughening up my nipples” in preparation for Leo’s arrival. At the time, I was just uncomfortable with her talking about my nipple activities in front of professional colleagues, but she also made the assumption that I was planning on nursing. As if it was unthinkable that I would be doing anything but.
There was also subtle pressure—the random older woman in a restaurant who asked me if I would be breastfeeding; the infant care classes where formula feeding wasn’t even mentioned; the nurse on my maternity ward tour who warned us that we’d be woken up every two hours to nurse, and asked for a show of hands: how many in the group were going to be breastfeeding? (Needless to say, all hands shot up.)
These experiences weren’t particularly unique, or even that bad in the scheme of things. Jennifer, who teaches at a prestigious Los Angeles private school, was told by a student’s dad that he “wouldn’t respect her as a woman” if she didn’t breastfeed. (He delivered this gem during a parent-teacher conference, no less. Bet that didn’t help his kid’s grade.) Nurse practitioner Shannon endured months of chastising from her peers when she confessed she was planning on formula feeding. “I did not expect to get the flak I did from other medical professionals—none of which are my personal physicians—about my decision not to breastfeed,” she lamented. “I was told multiple times, ‘Oh, why don’t you just pump for a month?’ ‘Why won’t you breastfeed, it’s the BEST thing you can do for your baby,’ ‘It’s such a great bonding experience,’ ‘You will regret not doing this.’ ”
I spoke with a young mother who finally decided to “swallow [her] pride” and enroll in WIC (the Women, Infants, and Children program, a government assistance plan the mission of which is to insure proper nutrition for low-income mothers and their children) when she was six months pregnant. “During intake I got asked if I was going to breastfeed. I said no, that as a sexual abuse survivor I was uncomfortable with it. … [M]y breasts had been used in my attack, and to do so was to feel like I was molesting my child, to feel like I had no control over my body as it was being used in service for others. The [licensed practical nurse] told me that if I really loved my baby, I would breastfeed.” She recounts that several of her WIC counselors told her that “they ‘knew’ lots of women who had been raped who breastfed,” and suggested that since she had obviously had sex to conceive a child since being attacked, she was sufficiently healed to nurse that child.
Most of the women I’ve interviewed cite their own previous judgment of formula feeders as an ironic reminder of how powerful the “good mothers breastfeed” meme really is. “I studied the breastfeeding failures of friends and family. … I assumed they were lazy. I assumed they didn’t try hard enough. I believed everything I read in breastfeeding literature as though it were the gospel truth,” says Kelli, whose son was ultimately unable to latch, causing jaundice and insufficient weight gain. A mom of twins had felt sure that “ ‘good’ mothers breastfed their children,” and admits she “bask[ed] in the praise I received when someone asked if I was planning on breastfeeding and I answered ‘of course.’ ”
“It’s almost like with something like circumcision, or ‘crying it out,’ there’s an understanding that multiple views are okay, but with breastfeeding we have reached a point where alternative viewpoints are considered uneducated or wrong,” says Stephanie Knaak, a Canadian sociologist who has written several well-regarded papers on the infant feeding discourse. “There’s a whole stream of thought that breastfeeding is natural and it’s for bonding and it’s this kind of wonderful mother-child relationship thing, and so it’s good in that way. And there’s the medical sciences aspect—we know that breastfeeding is very strong from a nutritional standpoint, and it protects your baby, it makes them healthy, and it makes mothers healthy. And then you’ve also got a public shifting of views about motherhood—that a good mother is the mother who does everything for her child. … [M]othering is supposed to be labor intensive, self sacrificing. Breastfeeding fits in very nicely with that idea. All of these different forces culminate into the same thing, and it makes it a particularly intense pressure. There aren’t really any forces that speak against it.”33
On the many lactivist blogs and Twitter feeds I followed while researching this book, the words of Eleanor Roosevelt would be thrown around like paper airplanes in a fourth-grade classroom—inappropriately and haphazardly, and often hitting unintended targets. Although Eleanor’s original verbiage involved inferiority, not guilt, the (mis)quote most often used when the subject of guilt and infant feeding arises is that “nobody can make you feel guilty without your consent.” In context, this quote often coincided with the argument that women feel guilty only because they know they have something to feel guilty about. In other words, it’s a good thing they feel guilty about how they are feeding their kids because they have royally mucked it up.
What the people who use this argument don’t seem to understand is that the most powerful motivator for breastfeeding is not peer pressure, fear, obedience, or any other “quiet coercion.” It’s desire. The desire to be everything your coveted child needs; the desire to have that indelible bond with the human you created; the desire to provide sustenance from your very being. And when for whatever reason this desire goes unfulfilled, the resulting emotion is often guilt—not because we feel like we did something wrong but because we
