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The Atlantic recently published an article by journalist Hanna Rosin entitled ‘The Case Against Breastfeeding.” Full of haphazardly injected studies and themes reminiscent of Jill Lepore’s meticulously researched January article in the New Yorker about breastfeeding and pumping milk, the article is not as much a case against breastfeeding as the provocative title suggests. Rosin conducts a sincere self-analysis of her feelings about herself, her marriage and the status of women, her struggle with traditional gender roles in a middle- to upper-class family, her modesty and feeling that breastfeeding is time-consuming and annoying. Rosin equates watching her friends pump milk with Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and states on the video that accompanies the article, “[Pumping at work] is the moment that brings together all the awfulness of being a modern mother.”
Though possibly intended to be tongue-in-cheek, some of the imagery that Hanna Rosin offers is a telltale indicator of her socioeconomic class and occasionally disgruntled relationship with her own body.
She doesn’t “breastfeed slavishly.” Breastfeeding full-time is for slaves!
Pumping is inconvenient when you’re a busy employee and is done to relieve yourself. Expressing milk at work is merely to relieve yourself of bodily fluids!
If you experience a let down in front of a male co-worker, the milk seeping through your shirt is a “stigmata” that you wear. Milk is sinful and shameful! Hide yourself from men!
Her friends that pumped did so out of panic, using machinery to pump their milk that looked like a Josef Mengele creation. Expressing milk with an electric pump is like committing a Nazi war crime on yourself!
Breastfeeding is only free “if a woman’s time is worth nothing.” Breastfeeding is unpaid labor and women have PAID work that requires their attention!
Rosin externalizes her own ambivalence about breastfeeding her child, to whom she feeds her milk part-time and enjoys the skin-to-skin contact, by blaming public health campaigns, volunteer organizations like La Leche League and a present day frenzy of parenting perfectionism for making her and other women feel guilty. Public health campaigns promoting breastfeeding seem then to have been designed as a means of making privileged, educated, literate, upper class women like Rosin feel bad about themselves for not mothering properly. Rosin makes them sound like an extension of the eugenics movement from the first half of the 20th century which in part sought to encourage reproduction of desirables by tying women to the hearth through pseudoscientific education and the glorification of all-things-motherly.
The one simple fact missing from the discussion that Rosin began about feeling guilted and bullied into a self-sacrificial role at the expense of her once egalitarian status in her marriage is that human milk is for human babies. It will always be superior nutritionally, not morally, than a formula comprised of cow’s milk or soy beans and a host of chemical additives. It doesn’t take a randomized control trial to arrive at the conclusion that mammalian milk is species specific. For many families, formula is lifesaving, especially since human milk banks are largely inaccessible and expensive in the U.S. When used according to directions, the vast majority of babies on formula thrive.
The Value of Public Health Campaigns
Public health campaigns are as much for doctors, nurses and the general public as they are for pregnant women
