Breastfeeding a crime?

If you thought staying home was the way to avoid being hassled for breastfeeding, watch out for BWI. That’s Breastfeeding While Intoxicated, and apparently it’s a crime, even when done in the privacy of your home. A North Dakota woman was jailed after cops were called to her house on a report of domestic violence, when she appeared drunk and she nursed her baby in front of them. Now the woman is in jail, facing up to five years in prison, and her nursing baby has been taken away from her.

Comments from one of the cops suggests that it wasn’t the drunkenness that got her arrested. It was the breastfeeding. Grand Forks Police Lt. Rahn Farder told the AP, "It is quite unusual for a mother to be breastfeeding her child as we are conducting an investigation, whether she was intoxicated or not." It actually sounds like good parenting in a very stressful circumstance. With cops bursting in and a man possibly having just beaten up the mother, the baby was probably screaming her head off, and there isn’t any better way I know to quiet and soothe an upset baby than breastfeeding.

While it’s probably not healthy for a nursing baby’s mother to be repeatedly intoxicated, there’s no evidence that breastfeeding during a single episode of drunkenness harms a baby at all, as a doctor blogging at Skeptical OB notes. On the other hand, the doctor says, feeding a baby a bottle while drunk actually might be harmful, because mixing formula in the wrong proportions could harm a baby. Yet all the details of the story suggest that the police would not have arrested her if she had been feeding the baby a bottle.

And of course separating a nursing baby from its mother is clearly harmful.

According to Salon, the cops didn’t do a blood alcohol test on either the mother or the baby.

What about the domestic violence that brought the cops to the house? The boyfriend who was likely the cause of the mom’s beat-up face was not charged. And people wonder why women don’t report domestic violence more often.

The mother has apparently pleaded guilty to the charges, which suggests she had a very bad lawyer. The case reeks. Where’s an ambulance-chaser when you need one? ACLU, somebody, sue the pants off that police department.

BTW: Love the Skeptical OB on this story and her point about Americans’ inability to assess relative risk (including her dig about the risk of putting kids in automobiles). She’s got some whiggy ideas about homebirth, though. I suspect she’s using bad data on homebirth safety—I look forward to checking into it.

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.

Breast is best; formula may be deadly

Yet another reason to breastfeed: The latest poison news from China is about babies sickened or even killed by tainted formula. Seems to me we've been here before. Remember the Nestle scandal back in the 1970s and '80s and the boycott that got Nestle to back off from marketing formula in the Third World?

The story of formula has always seemed to me like a parable of capitalism. Start with something free, a gift of nature, and figure out a way to get people to pay to buy a substitute. Brilliant!

Breast is certainly best. That said, there are many reasons women in industrialized countries may find themselves with few options but to feed their babies formula. If you work full time, it is challenging to keep breastfeeding. Believe me, I know this well. The last few weeks, since I've gone to fulltime paid work, have been stressful. Despite a supportive work environment where I have a comfortable place to pump, and a daycare that supports breastfeeding, I've just barely been keeping up with my baby's eating. Where breastfeeding is a beautiful balance, a perfect positive feedback loop, where the amount the baby eats determines how much milk a mother produces, pumping is a creaking substitute that easily becomes a vicious spiral. The machine rarely pulls out as much as a baby eats. And the stress over this can cause one's milk supply to slow. And then if you start supplementing, it's likely your supply will further decline, and so on.

All of which is not to say mothers of babies shouldn't work, but rather that a society that cares for children must provide a panoply of social supports, from paid leave to places and time to pump to well-paid part-time work.

For me, a combination of running down to the daycare at lunch each day to nurse, pumping all the time, and taking the herbs fenugreek and blessed thistle has worked--for now. The liquid gold reserves in the freezer are finally building up again. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Most women quit breastfeeding quickly

First the good news: Three out of four U.S. mothers are now breastfeeding their newborns, according to a recent study from Brigham Young University. I’ve heard horror stories from older women of babies being fed mixtures of Karo syrup, so let’s hear it for some enlightenment.

But now the bad news: Although the American Academy of Pediatricians recommends breastfeeding through the first year and the World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for two years. most women have quit breastfeeding by the time their baby reaches six months.

The researchers found that children who were most likely to be breast-fed for more than six months typically had mothers with higher levels of education and incomes. Before we all leap to blaming stupid moms, surely a major cause of the drop-off is the lack of paid family leave in this country, the pathetic part-time job market, lack of flexibility in most work places, and the downright hostility of most workplaces to pumping and breastfeeding. Those women with more education are more likely to be able to take significant time off and to have higher-status jobs where pumping is a viable option (Starbucks, for example, wins kudos for supporting mothers among its managerial staff, but just try being a barista and breastfeeding).

I’m here to tell you that breastfeeding is great—no need to remember to lug any food with you! And it’s free!—but pumping sucks. Itoffers nearly all the stupidity of formula feeding—endless bottle washing—and you have to hide in a bathroom or cleaning closet and hook yourself up to a milking machine, all the while watching the clock tick and hoping nobody else is noticing that, once again, you’re not at your desk. Which stress of course tends to reduce your milk production, which in turn ups your stress. I understand why women quit breastfeeding after they return to paid work.

But here’s to my fellow Western staters and to immigrants—the populations most likely to breastfeed.

Pope Benedict the lactivist?

I’ll make a wild bet here and predict this will be one of very few posts in which I praise the Catholic church’s stance on anything having to do with women and reproduction. So I’m going to enjoy this moment.

The official newspaper of the Holy See, L'Osservatore Romano, has chided Catholics for being offended by depictions of Mary’s breastfeeding baby Jesus. "Jesus was a baby like all others. His divinity does not exclude his humanity," church historian Lucetta Scaraffia said, according to the British Telegraph. The newspaper noted that since the 17th century artists have been covering up Mary’s mammaries to avoid “unbecoming” “carnality” in sacred images.

But, as Father Enrico dal Covolo, a professor of classic and Christian literature at the Pontifical Salesian University, pointed out in L’Osservatore, that’s kinda the point. The word made flesh and all that.

You ask me (and you did, since you came to this page), there isn’t anything more sacred and symbolic of the human condition than a mother nursing a child. Anybody who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch was never breastfed (or owes his mother an apology).

I may never say this again: Go, pope!

Now I’ll get tiresome and suggest that the irrepressibility of the Mary cult shows how tortured Christianity is. The ancient worship of the mother goddess makes a whole lot more sense than the death cult that is the Jesus myth, and the weirdness of the Holy Trinity dissolves if you let the threesome be father, mother, and child... I’m sure theologians all over the Holy See are now smacking their heads, saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and turning right to revising their texts. Get to it, boys.