Has the Battle for Breastfeeding Been Won?
“From where I sit”, reports Hannah Rosin in this diavlog, “everyone thinks you should breastfeed.” Can this possibly be right? And if so, doesn’t it say more about her seat than the societal trends she’s discussing? Here in ultra-progressive Berkeley and among our self-selecting group of friends, we’ve naturally experienced – and sometimes gone in for – a good deal of the no-holds-barred breastfeeding advocacy that’s got Rosin so riled up. But even so, we got formula pushed on us by a nurse at the hospital, know many other parents whose doctors or nurses did the same, and have friends and family members who for various reasons have breastfed only a little, if at all. And while one can do pretty well out here breastfeeding in public without getting disapproving looks from passersby, we’ve been in plenty of perfectly “enlightened” parts of the country where this simply isn’t so, and where the social stigma attached to nursing a child at church or in a museum or restaurant is hard to bear even for an hour, let alone a year or two or more. These, meanwhile, are just the easy cases; attitudes toward breastfeeding differ wildly across the country, and there’s every reason to think that Rosin’s experience, like ours, is very much the exception rather than the rule.
It is, I think, really this lack of sensitivity to the broader cultural situation that left my wife, like so many other nursing moms and breastfeeding advocates (“fascists”, Rosin calls them), so upset with Rosin’s much-discussed Atlantic essay. Rosin’s right, I think, to object to the unrealistic or overbearing attitudes that many breastfeeding advocates take to the subject: there’s no excuse for overstating or misrepresenting the science, and mothers who find nursing to be a burden should absolutely not feel guilt-ridden if they slip off to the store for formula or rice cereal. But the idea that the experience of having friends and physicians pressure a woman into breastfeeding and then make her feel tremendously guilty about the thought of stopping or cutting back is anywhere near the cultural norm even among Atlantic readers or the rest of the American overclasses seems quite unrealistic to me. It’s true that we need to find an appropriate middle ground, and that accomplishing that is going to require honesty about the benefits and burdens of whatever decisions mothers, fathers, and children choose to make. And no one should deny that perspectives like Rosin’s can play important roles in helping us to do these things. She’d be able to do that much more effectively, though, if she didn’t minimize the very different sets of challenges faced by mothers and children in circumstances different from her own.
It’s “not the vacuum”, Rosin writes, that’s “keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound”. No doubt this is true in a select handful of cases, but it gets things pretty badly backwards in a large range of others.
(Cross-posted at the new and improved Upturned Earth.)
Hmm, Rosin’s piece rang pretty true to me. Does Mr. Schwenkler (or his wife) live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and work and attend church primarily with college graduates? (I take it that is Rosin’s situation. Except maybe the church part.)
I wouldn’t know what happens west of the Hudson.
— y81 · May 14, 10:53 PM · #
Actually, we live on the lower west side of Berkeley and work and attend church primarily with college graduates. :)
Thing is, many people don’t. And ignorance of what happens west of the Hudson (and east of the Bay Area) is exactly the problem, of course …
— John Schwenkler · May 14, 11:02 PM · #
Breast feeding is what breasts are for. Seems weird not to use them.
And when magazine writers get all het up like that they do it to churn up opinion so people will read and comment on their article thus enhancing thier career. THey overstate things, use the word fascist, etc… That’s what I hate about magaznines. It’s always someone—whose motivation is career advancment—telling you what is hip or true or how yo shouldbe living your life.
— cw · May 14, 11:54 PM · #
I’m with John. I used to live next to some folks where the wife was full-in to La Leche but she wasn’t pushy about it at all. But we were in the South, where perhaps a bit more politesse reigns…
— Bryan · May 15, 01:29 AM · #
I thought Rosen’s piece was a bit of a joke. Of course she’s going to get ostracized by the mom brigade. I prefer the answering piece you linked to at AmCon:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/working-moms
— Cascadian · May 15, 02:13 PM · #
Rosin’s piece was flawed in the details: e.g., in response to the claim that “breastfeeding is free,” she writes, “It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.” An obtuse statement, considering that someone (Perhaps not the mother? Perhaps the hired help?) still has to spend the time sterilizing bottles, mixing formula, heating up formula, and feeding the formula to the baby. Someone is spending a lot of time feeding baby, whether breastfed or not. I think this speaks to the cultural divide John and his wife acknowledge but Rosin seems to miss.
It was also flawed in the big picture: e.g., Rosin states that a woman’s independence is one of the things she has to lose by breastfeeding. My response to both mothers and fathers: parenting well has a lot to do with a loss of “independence.” It also has to do with sacrifice; of one’s time, one’s energy, even one’s body. What have we become if our yardstick for parenting is all about how much independence we have retained, how self-actualized we are in spite of being parents? Even so it simply does not follow that the breastfeeding mother gets forced into making every other decision about the child’s rearing, as Rosin implies.
The article left me pleading, we are all adults here, right?? Wrong, apparently. From the behavior of the mothers Rosin encountered at the park (who gave her the cold shoulder for contemplating weaning her son early) to Rosin’s whining that breastfeeding equals perpetuating the patriarchy, there’s a very little adult behavior going around.
— Carrie Frederick Frost · May 15, 02:14 PM · #
I’m not sure what the point of this argument is—people who shame mothers for public breastfeeding are horrible, people who shame mothers for the bottle on the basis of weak correlational evidence, especially knowing nothing about that mother and baby’s individual circumstances, are also horrible. There’s a no trade off between the two.
I’ll grant you that Rosin’s quote at top is obtuse. But I still think her original article was an extremely valuable corrective. If the popular magazines were peddling bad or exaggerated science, then that hurts real mothers and babies and needs to be stopped. Mothers east of the Hudson are still people too.
— Consumatopia · May 15, 06:18 PM · #
I agree with this. And I agree that her article at least could have been a valuable corrective, if its tone weren’t so overwrought. The excesses Rosin identifies are, it seems to me, serious problems for only a very small number of women; that’s not to say that they’re not real concerns that need to be addressed, but only that Rosin’s inexcusable blindness to the situations of women in different cultural/socioeconomic situations than her own ultimately led her to exactly the same sorts of rhetorical extremes – and misrepresentations of the facts – for which she’s criticizing the breastfeeding “fascists”. It’s sort of like writing a piece (where have I seen such a thing? hmm …) complaining about excessive concern over dietary habits (which is fine) and insisting in addition that we really don’t have any public health problems at all, that everyone in America would eat just fine if left to their own devices, because among my group of wealthy, highly-educated friends, we all know that organic is the best!
— John Schwenkler · May 15, 06:32 PM · #
My wife is due with our first at the end of June. I just finished reading a fascinating book on the anthropology of childbirth and early child-rearing by Meredith Small called “Our Babies, Ourselves.” Dr. Small goes in to clinical research regarding the benefits (and detriments) of breastfeeding — though I found her chapter on sleeping patterns far more interesting — and she explores how cultural expectations and family environment can run contrary to biology. Check it out.
— James F. Elliott · May 15, 06:34 PM · #
Oh, this is just a female v. female status battle.
— Steve Sailer · May 16, 09:24 PM · #