If I offer support to the victims of an earthquake in South America does that mean I can’t offer support the victims of a typhoon in South East Asia, too?
If I express support for those who lost their homes in a hurricane does that mean I can’t express support for those who lost their homes in a wildfire, too?
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Support is not a zero sum game.[/pullquote]
If I support women who have breast cancer, does that mean I can’t support women who have ovarian cancer, too?
Sounds ridiculous, right?
So why can’t I support formula feeding mothers AND support breastfeeding mothers?
Because lactivism embraces victimhood as central to its understanding of breastfeeding and the women who choose it.
This Facebook comment is a perfect example:
“Don’t shame me for formula feeding by saying breast is best but I’ll downplay your accomplishment of breastfeeding by saying fed is best” That’s all I’m hearing from you.
In the world of lactivism, support is a zero sum game and any support offered to women who choose formula feeding is viewed as support that is stolen from breastfeeding mothers.
The celebration of their victimization serves several important roles in the lactivist cosmology. First, and foremost, it guarantees moral superiority. As Sommer and Baumeister explained in the book The human quest for meaning:
…[C]laiming the victim status provides a sort of moral immunity. The victim role carries with it the advantage of receiving sympathy from others and thereby prevents [one’s own behavior] from impugning one’s character…
Never mind that women who try breastfeeding represent the overwhelming majority of women, lactivists insist breastfeeders are a tiny minority, oppressed by the formula industry, and ceaselessly harassed by formula feeders. They’re victims dammit and that means that nothing they do to promote breastfeeding is ever wrong.
Second, the insistence on victimization serves to simplify the world by creating a false dichotomy. For lactivists, the world is divided into diametrically opposed camps of breastfeeders and formula feeders. It seems never to have occurred to them that combining breastfeeding and formula feeding is not merely possible, but common. Since the world is divided into diametrically opposed camps, in the lactivist cosmology everyone is either with them or against them.
When you are a breastfeeding victim, the fact that others don’t agree with you, or at least validate your feelings of victimization, is viewed as a form of re-victimization.
Other women choose formula? They are victimizing you by refusing to mirror your choice back to you.
Formula feeders want to choose formula without being harassed by hospital lactation consultants, vilified by breastfeeders, or told that they aren’t “baby friendly”? They’re victimizing you.
What if I (or anyone else) point out that the benefits of breastfeeding in the industrialized world have been massively exaggerated and are, in reality, limited to a few less infant colds and episodes of diarrheal illness in the first year? I am supposedly victimizing you. Lactivists insist I hate breastfeeding, and imagine I bathe daily in Similac, drying off using hundred dollar bills sent by Nestle as payment for services rendered.
Third, their status as self-proclaimed victims has been instrumental in allowing lactivists (particularly professional lactivists like La Leche League) to take control of public health messages and discussion in the public sphere. Breastfeeding rates were low purportedly because of the victimization of breastfeeders. That was the justification behind massive public and private initiatives to support breastfeeders and thereby promote breastfeeding. How has it worked out?
As a society, we have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting breastfeeding in order to improve child health and save on medical costs. Where’s our return on investment? Where is the evidence that overall infant health has improved as a result of breastfeeding rates nearly quadrupling in the past 50 years? There isn’t any. Where are the billions of dollars in healthcare savings we were promised as a result of increasing breastfeeding rates? No one can find them.
Yet lactivists continue promoting these programs and initiatives on the grounds that breastfeeding mothers are being victimized.
Interestingly, the goalposts of lactivist victimization are always moving. Fifty years ago the evidence of breastfeeders’ victimization was that hospitals did not support their efforts. In 2019, when hospitals do everything humanly (and inhumanely) possible to increase breastfeeding rates and when even cans of formula proclaim “breast is best,” failure to wholeheartedly embrace and praise public breastfeeding is viewed as … you guessed it … victimization.
Indeed, the goalposts have moved so far, basic civility to women who choose formula feeding as best for their babies is routinely cited —as in the Facebook comment above — as victimization of women who breastfeed.
It’s time for lactivists to grow up and stop bleating endlessly about their victimization. Breastfeeding is just one of two excellent ways to nourish an infant, nothing more and nothing less. Breastfeeders aren’t morally superior, aren’t better mothers, and certainly aren’t being victimized. They’re no different from formula feeding mothers, both trying to do what is best for their babies, their families and themselves.
Support is not a zero sum game.
We can support women who breastfeed AND women who formula feed. We don’t have to choose between them … no matter how much lactivists insist that we do.
