When asked at a recent concert about breastfeeding, singer Adele didn’t mince words:
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]PUSH BACK against the guilt![/pullquote]
The “Hello” singer was greeting members of the audience during a performance at London’s O2 Arena when a group asked her about breastfeeding mothers. Adele, who has a three-year-old son, responded by condemning the perception that breastfeeding is easy and reassuring women who struggle to breastfeed that formula milk is just as beneficial.
“It’s f**king ridiculous, and all those people who put pressure on us, you can go f**k yourselves, alright?,” she said. “Because it’s hard. Some of us can’t do it! I managed about nine weeks with my boobs (I mean I trip over them – I’ve got a very good push-up bra). Some of my mates got post-natal depression from the way those midwives were talking. Idiots.
“Breastfeed if you can but don’t worry, [formula milk] Aptamil’s just as good. I mean, I loved it, all I wanted to do was breastfeed and then I couldn’t and then I felt like, ‘if I was in the jungle now back in the day, my kid would be dead because my milk’s gone.’”
Adele is right. While breastfeeding has real benefits, in countries with clean water the benefits for term babies are small, limited to a few less colds and episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants. Nearly all the other purported benefits touted by the breastfeeding industry are based on scientific evidence that is weak, conflicting and riddled with confounding variables.
Why is the pressure on new mothers to breastfeed “fu**ing ridiculous”? It’s because the breastfeeding industry has moralized breastfeeding, and the moralization of breastfeeding has paralleled its monetization.
La Leche League was founded as a volunteer organization providing peer to peer breastfeeding counseling. Then in the 1980’s the folks at LLL began to wonder why they were giving away information for free when they could make money from the same information. They spun off an organization that created the lactation consultant credential; women who previously earned nothing for giving breastfeeding advice at LLL meetings, now were earning $100/hr or more giving the same advice for profit.
LLL and lactation consultants themselves began aggressively promoting and lobbying at all levels of government for lactation consultants in hospitals and doctors’ offices. They’ve grossly exaggerated the benefits of breastfeeding and minimized the difficulties for women. Regrettably, they hit upon the best marketing technique of all: they moralized infant feeding and convinced doctors (who should have known better) to moralize it, too.
Breastfeeding in 2016 has no greater or lesser benefits than breastfeeding in 1976, but the urgency around breastfeeding has grown phenomenally, far out of proportion to its actual benefits. That has harmed mothers and it hasn’t helped babies. The fact is that approximately 5% of women can’t make enough breastmilk to fully support a growing infant. Those babies are starving and their frantic mothers are admonished to “breastfeed harder,” get more help from lactation consultants, buy pumps and otherwise enrich the breastfeeding industry … and blame themselves for not giving their babies “the best.”
This pressure around breastfeeding — and natural childbirth and attachment parenting, too — has got to stop. That’s why I wrote PUSH BACK: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting. The pressure is not based on science, enriches an industry at the expense of women and babies, and is profoundly anti-feminist, telling women how they must use their own reproductive organs.
In this clip I explain why women should push back against the guilt.
