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Admittedly, most talk of the health care bill and the state of medical care in our country causes my eyes to glaze over. (Apologies to my many friends who are talented, valuable doctors.) But this spring, new research was released with quite a splash, catching my attention.
The recent study said that the lives of 900 babies could be saved, along with billions of dollars in lost employee wages, if 90% of American women breastfed their babies exclusively for the first six months. I am not sure which part of that goal stuns me more – the 90%, the six months or the “exclusively.”
When you really think through those demands, it is no wonder that only 12% of American mothers currently comply with that goal. And they’re hoping for a 600% improvement – even for the government, those are some pretty high expectations.
Sure, I’m all for solving the deficit and saving lives, but aren't there far more insidious foes out there than suboptimal breastfeeding rates? For example, smoking during pregnancy is said to cause more than 1,000 deaths annually. And yet, more than 12% of women report smoking during the last three months of pregnancy. I’ll go out on a limb of deductive reasoning here and say that 12% is not the same 12% that breastfeed exclusively.
I lend full support to the efforts of the study, The Burden of Suboptimal Breastfeeding in the United States: breastfeeding-friendly legislation, more support for nursing mothers in the workplace, and more breastfeeding help for new mothers in our hospitals.
However, a goal of 90% of American mothers to breastfeed exclusively for six months is an effort I cannot rally behind, and nor frankly, as a woman and citizen, do I think it is a very healthy goal. Sure, doctors and researchers have been able to put numbers and dollars on losses due to the nation’s breastfeeding rates. But what they haven’t looked at is what these “suboptimal” rates have prevented or gained for American women, children and families. Where are the statistics on how many marriages have been saved by limiting breastfeeding? Or simply what postpartum independence has meant for women’s mental health, and their confidence and trust in their relevance outside the domestic sphere?
When baby comes home from the hospital, there are those few first magical days of shared responsibility with your lab partner. And then, inevitably, someone’s got to take charge. With breastfeeding, there is no question who is in charge: the authority, the source, the expert, the ultimate backstop. And for many, so begins the road of resentment. A road on which it is very difficult to make a U-turn.
For many women and couples, having a baby is an epochal event, after which a tenuous level of shared responsibility and psychological equality can be recovered. Half a year of exclusive breastfeeding would make such reparations nearly impossible.
I suffer this bizarrely narcissistic relationship to many of the challenges of parenting and find myself frequently thinking, "If it’s this hard for me, imagine what it’s like for..." Breastfeeding was no exception.
For me, nursing was fine. Which is a far cry from saying it was easy. I can still recall the nights with my firstborn when we’d play our own little game of "who can cry longer, baby or mother?" And of course, it’s strategic cousin, "who can cry louder?" (That one was more fun during daylight hours while Slim was away.)
I nursed each of my children for respectable terms – 3 months, 5 months and an almost embarrassing 10 months. I stayed at home. I worked. I used a pump (and there is nothing stylish about the Pump-In-Style). I nursed in the Nordstrom’s "Mother’s Lounge" and pumped in the dressing room at The Gap. I breastfed in the front seat of the car on I-95, though never while driving. I even breastfed on a bathroom floor in Dallas while wearing a bridesmaid’s dress. It was novel, it was never elegant, and it always struck me as more science fiction than biblical.
I do not resent breastfeeding, my children, or my nearly perfect husband. I do resent the expectation that after carrying a baby for nine months, American women should surrender control for six more months.
Because it’s not just the physical and time commitments that breastfeeding requires (which at 6 to 18 hours a day is, no doubt, significant). Being a nursing mother overrides
