Fed Is Best is winning!
How do I know? Because lactation professionals keep falling back. The latest effort involves defending their relentless pressure on women by invoking breastfeeding “goals.”
“Breast is best” and the “Baby Friendly” Hospital Initiative represented frontal assaults on women’s psyches. Since at least 1996, lactation professionals have sought to promote breastfeeding by shaming women.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Pious concern for women’s feelings is difficult to take seriously when it comes from the very people who have enshrined pressuring women to breastfeed as a lactivist goal.[/pullquote]
Watch Your Language, written in 1996 by lactation consultant Diane Weissinger, set out the terms of engagement:
When we fail to describe the hazards of artificial feeding, we deprive mothers of crucial decision-making information. The mother having difficulty with breastfeeding may not seek help just to achieve a “special bonus”; but she may clamor for help if she knows how much she and her baby stand to lose. She is less likely to use artificial baby milk just “to get him used to a bottle” if she knows that the contents of that bottle cause harm.
Breastfeeding rhetoric was honed to coerce women and to silence those who refused to cooperate. Lactation professionals were taught to treat women who can’t or don’t want to breastfeed, not as individuals with valid concerns, but as deviants who jeopardize lactivist goals. They were taught to literally ignore the suffering of babies — dehydration, jaundice, hypoglycemia, — in favor of long term “benefits.”
Testimonial silencing — ignoring the experiences of suffering mothers — has been standard practice, but now those mothers are refusing to be ignored and breastfeeding professionals have been forced to respond.
That doesn’t mean that they’ve recognized the error of their ways, though; they have no intention of stopping aggressive breastfeeding promotion. But they have changed their rhetoric to reflect the fact that that direct pressure won’t be tolerated anymore. How? By invoking breastfeeding “goals.”
“Look at us,” they invite. “We’re not pressuring women to breastfeed; we’re helping them meet their goals!
Prof. Amy Brown leads the way with papers like What Do Women Lose if They Are Prevented From Meeting Their Breastfeeding Goals?
Brown could not be clearer that the invocation of breastfeeding goals is an effort to fend off the increasing popularity of “fed is best”:
…[T]he argument that we see played out across the media often centers on the suggestion that there is too much pressure on women to breastfeed, and to protect maternal health we should instead take a more mother-centered approach, promoting all feeding options as equal. The focus should be on ensuring a baby is fed, with the proposition that anything else is just noise, with minimal real impact upon mother and baby. Criticisms have been made of the lactation field, predominantly by those with a social sciences background, with accusations of “militant lactivism” destroying women’s mental health.
How dare those with social sciences backgrounds — psychologists, philosophers, women’s rights advocates — imagine they have anything to offer on the topics of women’s mental health and their right to bodily autonomy?
But this “argument” isn’t just foolish; it’s toxic. To understand why, replace breastfeeding with dieting. Imagine if the fashion and diet industries tried to combat the threat posed by body positivity movements by invoking women’s “weight goals.”
The argument centers on the suggestion that there is too much pressure on women to diet and to protect women’s mental health we should take a more woman-centered approach by promoting all women as good regardless of their weight. The focus should be on ensuring that women are physically healthy and everything else has minimal real impact on women. Criticisms of the fashion and diet industries have been made, predominantly by those with a social science background, insisting pressuring women to achieve a certain dress size is harming women’s mental health.
See? Pressuring women to starve themselves to thinness isn’t harmful; it’s just helping them achieve their “weight goals.”
Ugly
Brown writes:
Questioning why women want to breastfeed is illogical in as far as we do not question why human beings wish to use any other function that their body was designed for. Women describe an urge to breastfeed as something that is instinctual; physically, in that their body produces milk without their choice, and emotionally, in that women often cannot describe why they so strongly want to breastfeed, they just do …
But women were also designed to be thin. That doesn’t make the desire to be thin instinctual just like it doesn’t make women instinctively desire to live in caves. The desire to be thin is socially conditioned. How do we know? Because desires have changed over time. In some cultures, and at times in our own, being overweight (think “Rubenesque”) was valued and being thin was a sign of poverty. Similarly, in 1950’s America, formula feeding was culturally valued as technologically superior and physically easier.
Indeed, Weissinger’s famous paper on breastfeeding rhetoric explicitly set out to change culture.
All of us within the profession want breastfeeding to be … the CULTURAL norm … (my emphasis)
Brown’s insistence that the desire to breastfeed is instinctual isn’t merely factually wrong; it disingenuous since Brown acknowledges — in the very same piece — that the “goal” of breastfeeding is a cultural goal.
Brown writes:
Breastfeeding and the concept of maternal identity go hand in hand. Breastfeeding is often part of what women envisage themselves doing as a mother. Women report seeing breastfeeding as a way of identifying with a type of mother they wish to be, to fulfill what they see as a maternal physiological role. It is not simply about milk transfer, but a mothering tool, one helping to enhance bonding and closeness. It is a relationship and an experience, rather than simply a nutritional means …
Why do they feel that way? Because Brown and her colleagues have spent the past two decades telling women that is how they ought to feel.
The invocation of breastfeeding “goals” is gaslighting on steroids.
Women may lose something — may even feel anguish — when they fail to meet their breastfeeding goals, just as they feel anguish when they fail to meet their weight goals. But in both cases the primary problem is not the failure to meet the goals but the goals themselves.
Pious concern for women’s feelings is difficult to take seriously when it comes from the very people — like Amy Brown — who have enshrined pressuring women to breastfeed as a lactivist goal.
