Rosin smackdown

Discovered a new blog today, PhD in Parenting, and found the best researched answer to Hannah Rosin's Case Against Breastfeeding I've yet seen. Check it out.

Breastfeeding not a feminist issue?

Annals of unsurprising news: Someone has finally studied the economic impact of breastfeeding and found, you guessed it, breastfeeding for a “long” time—anything more than six months—hurts a woman’s earnings. This via Slate’s Hannah Rosin, of “The Case Against Breastfeeding” fame, who correctly notes that the impact of breastfeeding on women’s earnings should be an obvious question, yet none of the breast-feeding literature mentioned it until now.

Like Rosin, I’m glad someone finally studied the question. It is maddening the way that the “breast is best” campaign treats the decision whether to breastfeed as if it occurred in a vacuum, as if it were solely an individual mother’s responsibility, rather than a social one—whether to create a society that enables breastfeeding or not. To push breast-feeding “as if it only affects an infant's health, and not the woman's life or position in her family, and her workplace” is wrongheaded. It’s also, by the way, an anti- or at the very least non-feminist move.

So Rosin’s right that not all efforts to push breastfeeding are feminist. Perhaps that’s all she means by her zinger of a last line: “Breast-feeding now loses its free pass into the feminist cause.” But she seems to imply much more—that breastfeeding isn’t a feminist issue at all.

It’s interesting to consider the history of the original breast-is-best-ers: the founders of La Leche League, who thought of themselves as early feminists and sought to wrest control of mothering back from the experts. At the time their movement arose, medicine typically assumed that mothers knew nothing about the business of mothering and that the female body was a defective object. Edwina Froehlich, one of the founders, was told by her doctor to forget about trying to breastfeeding because, at 36, she was too old. That she did so anyway must have been tremendously empowering. A friend of mine told me she once looked at her plump, six-month-old, entirely breastfed, child and thought proudly, “That’s all me.” Consider that no one but a nursing mother is ever indispensable to anyone. The inventors of formula sought to dispense with her.

As the La Leche League founders saw, breastfeeding is an issue about women's power. That makes it a feminist issue.

Yet the La Leche League founders were all Catholics housewives and they wrote in their breastfeeding manual as late as 1981, “Our plea to any mother who is thinking about taking an outside job is, ‘if at all possible, don’t.’ ”

That’s hardly a feminist position, precisely because it assumes the male-dominated standards of the work world, rather than questioning them. But that’s just what Rosin seems to be doing. There is, currently, a conflict between the demands of work and the needs of mothers; surely any feminist worth the name thinks it’s the work world that needs to change, not mothers.

Vote! Should media continue the Mommy Wars?

Unsurprisingly, “The Case Against Breastfeeding” has provoked a deluge of responses (including my earlier one), and like clockwork the media have digested Hannah Rosin’s nuanced, complex (and problematic) account of her own experience into a soundbite. MSNBC, for example, blithely spews, “Some women are questioning whether the health benefits are worth it. Breast-feeding provides benefits to mothers and babies, but can also be uncomfortable and inconvenient for working moms.” Our work culture erects nearly insurmountable barriers to breastfeeding, so we should…forget breastfeeding. The bathwater is indispensable; out with the baby.

It gets better. Find this at the bottom of the MSNBC article: “Vote! Should Mothers Breastfeed Their Babies?”

Hilarious. An article decrying the oppressiveness of judging women for their breastfeeding practices prompts a public vote to tell mothers whether to breastfeed.

For a soundbite that gets it right, try this from MomsRising: “Moms are being urged to breastfeed but set up to fail.” Quite.

The case against self-hatred

Where to begin to rebut the “Case Against Breastfeeding”? In this month’s Atlantic, Hannah Rosin claims breastfeeding keeps women down—she compares it to the vacuum cleaner of the 50s ‘Feminine Mystique'—and that the evidence for its health benefits is thin.

There are some serious flaws in Rosin’s claims about the science, nicely described here. And the idea that breastfeeding is itself as oppressive as being a 1950s housewife is just weird.

But what I find the most intriguing element of the piece is what shows up in the first two paragraphs. Rosin describes being ostracized in the playground when she tells other mothers she’s thinking about cutting short the breastfeeding of her third child.

…circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets. In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.

There’s so much here to, as they used to say in grad school, unpack, that the mind reels. It’s a classic reactionary setup, really quite Rovian: It sets up a hated elite (lattes and chardonnay here are replaced by organic snacks and sleek strollers, but the effect is the same as in a Limbaugh rant) who engage in terrible oppression, which justifies a counter-attack, much as the Christian right typically must paint themselves as oppressed and embattled to justify their attacks on gays, civil liberties, and women’s reproductive rights.

Yet in the real world, it’s women who breastfeed for the full two years the WHO recommends who are the struggling minority in the U.S. Only 31 percent of U.S. babies are breastfed exclusively for even three months, and only 11 percent are exclusively breastfed through six months, and that with breastfeeding having recently reached new highs. Among the reasons women most commonly cite for giving up breastfeeding or supplementing with formula is—can you guess?—returning to work. This is no surprise, given that there is no such thing as paid family leave in this country, nor even are most workers guaranteed their jobs back if they take unpaid leave.

In my highly progressive, pro-breastfeeding circles, I know of almost no mothers who returned to work fulltime who continued breastfeeding exclusively. It is nearly impossible to do so.

Still, I think Rosin is, in a warped way, on to something in perceiving herself ostracized among her privileged community for considering cutting breastfeeding off. Our misogynistic culture maddeningly, at once curtails our choices (by not offering paid leave, for example, or for permitting hospital practices that discourage breastfeeding) and valorizes individual choice as its pre-eminent value. Women often respond to this contradiction by turning on other women. It exacts such a toll in this culture to acknowledge that one hasn’t acted freely—especially in the deeply intimate sphere of reproduction--that many women would prefer to embrace their supposed “choices” and vilify other women who made different “choices.”

I think of the friend of mine who, while 8 months pregnant, was sneered at by another mother for planning a nonmedicated birth. “Well, if you want to be a martyr, you go right ahead.” Given the high rate of women who report having had disempowering birth experiences, I suspect that many women who have experienced awful treatment in birth have as the path of least resistance embraced their “choices,” leaving no honest outlet for their anger, which gets channeled at other women.

This is a problem that goes way beyond breastfeeding and it’s far past time for women to stop turning on each other. I welcome thoughts.