Professor Charlotte Faircloth has written a simple, tightly argued piece cautioning us not to moralize infant feeding, and lactivists have become unhinged.
Faircloth merely states the obvious in Breastfeeding doesn’t determine a child’s future, so we should stop pretending like it does:
…[T]he assumption that how a woman feeds her baby in the early months will have life-long physical (and psychological) implications – a message echoed by the host of “experts” that now colonize early parenting – means that many women feel a huge sense of obligation to breastfeed (and therefore creating the two rather unappealing options of being “smug” or “guilty.”) …
[H]ow a mother feeds her baby is just one small part of the parenting jigsaw, and not one that will determine her child’s future outcomes. Women need infant feeding support that starts from them and their family’s needs, not more governmental hectoring, or sensationalist spats in the media, which just continue to fuel this already over-heated, destructive debate.
Faircloth is no stranger to decying efforts to moralize infant feeding. In her paper ‘What Science Says is Best’: Parenting Practices, Scientific Authority and Maternal Identity Faircloth explains the meaning of “the science” of breastfeeding to lactivists. “The science” is simply a convenient cudgel which lactivists use to metaphorically hammer away at women who do not follow their example:
The scientific benefits of breastfeeding and attachment parenting serve as a (seemingly) morally neutral cannon about which mothers can defend their mothering choices and ‘spread the word’ about appropriate parenting.
In the minds of lactivists, “the science” turns breastfeeding from a choice to an obligation.
When ‘science’ says something is healthiest for infants, it has the effect, for [lactivists], of shutting down debate; that is, it dictates what parents should do.
… [U]nder the assumption that science contains ‘no emotional content’, a wealth of agencies with an interest in parenting – from policy makers and ‘experts’ to groups of parents themselves – now have a language by which to make what might better be termed moral judgements about appropriate childcare practices. [But] ‘Science’ is not a straightforward rationale in the regulation of behaviour, rather, it is one that requires rigorous sociological questioning and debate in delimiting the parameters of this ‘is’ and the ‘ought’.
In Contextualising risk, constructing choice: Breastfeeding and good mothering in risk society. Stephanie Knaak, a sociologist, explains that breastfeeding promotion in first world countries is not about what an infant eats.
… this discourse is not a benign communique about the relative benefits of breastfeeding, but an ideologically infused, moral discourse about what it means to be a ‘good mother’ in an advanced capitalist society.
Lactivists have gone far beyond simple attempts to educated women about the benefits of breastfeeding. They have explicitly framed one feeding choice as “good” and another as “bad.” And they imply that only those women who make “good” choices can be good mothers.
… [T]his association of breastfeeding with ‘good mothering’ and formula feeding with ‘not so good mothering’ has been argued to be a key characteristic of today’s dominant infant feeding discourse. In large part, this can be attributed to the fact that pro-breastfeeding discourse is organised and mediated by: (a) a moralising public health ideology; and (b) the ‘ideology of intensive mothering’, today’s dominant parenting ideology.
In other words, breastfeeding promotion is not about nourishment and it’s not even about babies. It’s about mothers and how they wish to see themselves. Simply put, if breastfeeding is not vastly superior to infant formula, lactivists are not vastly superior to other mothers. Hence the vicious responses to Faircloth’s piece.
One commentor in particular regurgitates the greatest hits of lactivist propaganda:
Bottle fed infants are far more likely to have speech impediments, especially in boys.No one thrives on bottle milk, they survive it. Try measuring their tooth and bone density and checking how overcrowded their lower jaws are if you think they are thriving. And a woman dying every 20 minutes in the UK from breastcancer, a disease that doesn’t exist in fully breastfeeding cultures, well they’re hardly thriving are they?
And:
You are wrong to say their bodies fail them. Hospitals are overheated overlit and staffed by strangers so overuse is made of anaesthetic. All these make breastfeeding an uphill struggle. On release from hospital they are advised to feed with very restricted access to the breast, the last feed at night is advised and unnaturally long gaps between feeds.Without frequent enough feeds no woman’s body can produce enough milk. It is the health service that fails women, not their bodies.As for your mother in law, you may be confusing confidence and independence with not being close.
And my favorite:
The hormones of breastfeeding promote a sense of goodwill which is designed to be directed towards the baby. They are called the love hormones and they are released during breastfeeding. A bottle feeding mother can be caring, but she doesn’t have nature working in her favour, always a disadvantage when you are exhausted and in constant demand by another person.
Personally, the love I had for my babies was so overwhelming that nothing could dimish it, and I hardly had to rely on hormones to support that love.
The truth about breastfeeding in industrialized countries is that it is the designer handbag of parenting. Is it better than formula feeding? Marginally, as designer handbags are marginally better than run of the mill handbags. But the differences are trivial, and just as a regular handbag is an excellent way to carry your wallet and car keys, formula feeding is an excellent way to nourish an infant. Designer handbags convey status in a world where some women are desperate to feel superior to others, and breastfeeding conveys status in a world where some mothers are desperate to feel superior to other mothers.
These women moralize infant feeding because it makes them feel better about themselves. For them, breastfeeding has to be superior, otherwise they’re not superior … and that is simply intolerable.
