Another day, another misogynistic effort to pressure women to breastfeed. Today it is The Guardian piece Low UK breastfeeding rates down to social pressures over routine and sleep.
Speaking at the British Science Festival, Amy Brown of Swansea University said:
“We are told by so-called experts that you should get your baby in a feeding routine and your baby should not wake up at nights,” said Brown. “But that is really incompatible for breastfeeding. If you try and feed them less, you make less milk. You need to feed at night to make enough milk.”
Why do women stop breastfeeding?
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The Right puts women into religious purdah. The Left puts women in the purdah of biological essentialism.[/pullquote]
Speaking ahead of the publication of her book, Breastfeeding Uncovered, Brown said that while a large proportion of mothers struggle to breastfeed, few of them have underlying conditions that prevent the process.
Surveying around 300 women who had stopped breastfeeding in the first six months, Brown found that around 80% cited pain and difficulty as contributing, while 40% referenced public attitudes, 60% lack of support from others and 20% blamed embarrassment. (my emphasis)
Brown then proceeds to ignore her findings that 80% women stop because breastfeeding because of pain and difficulty! Apparently that’s just the price that “Nature” wants women to pay.
She speaks disparagingly of women’s exhaustion and desire for a life besides mothering:
We are told by so-called experts that you should get your baby in a feeding routine and your baby should not wake up at nights,” said Brown. “But that is really incompatible for breastfeeding. If you try and feed them less, you make less milk. You need to feed at night to make enough milk…
Not to be outdone:
Elizabeth Duff, senior policy adviser at the National Childbirth Trust, agreed that frequent feeding is necessary. “It is obviously easier for everyone if they begin to sleep more during the night, but if you are fully breastfeeding you will have to feed for at least once and probably two or three times during the night,” she said. “The daily patterns will come, but it won’t be in the first few days or the very first weeks.”
Exhaustion and inability to do anything besides breastfeeding is just another price that “Nature” demands.
Lactivists have fallen back on the racist, eugenics argument first advanced by Grantly Dick-Read to promote natural childbirth: Over-civilized white women have been socialized to betray their biological purpose.
Grantly Dick-Read believed that pain in labor was all in women’s heads. White women of the “better” classes had been socialized to believe that childbirth was painful, while primitive (read: black) women understood that their purpose was to produce and nurture babies and therefore had painless labors.
Grantly Dick-Read made up his theory to counter what he perceived as women’s failure to achieve their “biological purpose,” agitating for political and economic rights instead.
In other words, get back home, get pregnant, and stay there. Your needs, desires, intellect and talents don’t matter.
Lactivists are saying something similar: Get back home and breastfeed. Your needs, desires, intellect and talents don’t matter.
Why do lactivists and other natural parenting advocate seek to imprison women in their reproductive biology?
One of the greatest achievements of the 20th Century was the political and economic emancipation of women.
Of course, it only occurred for some women in some countries, but it was a milestone, nonetheless. For the first time in human history, women were finally judged for something other than the function of their breasts, uteri and vaginas.
Seismic change is rarely accomplished without backlash and the emancipation of women is no different. On the Right, there has been a retreat into religious fundamentalism, forcibly preventing women from taking their place in the wider world by convincing them that God intends for them to stay home bearing and raising children.
On the Left, there has been a retreat into “natural parenting,” attempting to force women back into the home by appealing to biological essentialism, hectoring women that “Nature” intends for them to stay home bearing and raising children.
The Right puts women into religious purdah, restricted to the home. The natural parenting advocates on the Left put women in the purdah of biological essentialism.
Forcing women back into the home to breastfeed is justified by appeals to “science,” but the science on breastfeeding benefits is weak, conflicting and riddled by confounding variables. That includes the “science” of the oft cited Lancet paper that claimed that exclusive breastfeeding could save 800,000 infant lives per year.
Really?
The overwhelming majority of infant deaths occur in the poorest countries where breastfeeding rates approach 100%. How exactly is enforced, exclusive, extended breastfeeding going to save lives in the UK or the US where vanishingly few infants die of non-accidental causes of death? The lactivists don’t say.
In truth, the health benefits of breastfeeding in countries like the UK and the US are trivial, limited to 8% fewer colds and 8% fewer episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants in the first year. In other words, the majority of infants will experience NO health benefit from breastfeeding.
No matter. The “science” is merely the cudgel used to force women back into their biological purdah.
The way forward is that we need a complete societal change to how we look at breastfeeding, how we accept it, but also how we accept and value mothering in general,” said Brown …
No, the way forward is that we need a complete societal change to how we look at WOMEN. They are more than their breasts, uteri and vaginas.
HER baby, HER body, HER breasts, HER choice.
Anything else is misogyny masquerading as concern for babies.
