Breasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.

––Iris Marion Young

After Hurricane Katrina, I read a news story about a young mother whose newborn baby died of dehydration during the days in which she had been stranded without access to clean water. Upon admittance to the hospital, the mother was asked if she needed anything and she replied that her breasts were uncomfortable and could she have something to dry up the milk. This story brings tears to my eyes and chills to my body. What does this say about our culture that it is actually possible for mothers to be unaware that they carry the power to completely nourish their own babies with their own bodies? As mammals, all women have the potential to be lactating women until we choose not to be. The genius of formula marketing and advertising is to get women to withhold from their offspring that which they already have and to instead purchase a replacement product of questionable quality. To me this feels like being a given a “choice” between the blood already flowing through your veins and a replacement product that marginally resembles blood.

We are mammals because as a species we nurse our young. This is a fundamental tie between the women of our time and place and the women of all other times and places as well as between the female members of every mammal species that have ever lived. It is our root tie to the planet, to the cycles of life, and to mammal life on earth. It is precisely this connection to the physical, the earthy, the material, the mundane, the body, that breastfeeding challenges men, feminists, and society.

Breastfeeding is a feminist issue and a fundamental women’s issue. And, it is an issue deeply embedded in a sociocultural context. Attitudes towards breastfeeding are intimately entwined with attitudes toward women, women’s bodies, and who has “ownership” of them. Patriarchy chafes at a woman having the audacity to feed her child with her own body, under her own authority, and without the need for any other. Feminism sometimes chafes at the “control” over the woman’s body exerted by the breastfeeding infant.

Part of the root core of patriarchy is a rejection of the female and of women’s bodies as abnormal OR as enticing or sinful or messy, hormonal, complicated, confusing…. Authentic feminism need not be about denying biological differences between women and men, but instead about defining both as profoundly worthy and capable and of never denying an opportunity to anyone for a sex-based reason. Feminism can be about creating a culture that values what is female as well as what is male, not a culture that tries to erase or hide “messy” evidence of femaleness.

However, precisely because of the patriarchal association of the female with the earthy and the physical, feminists have perhaps wanted to distance themselves from breastfeeding. This intensely embodied biologically mandated physical experience so clearly represents a fundamental difference between men and women that it appears to bolster biological reductionism. Yet in so doing feminism then colludes with patriarchy and itself becomes a tool of the patriarchy in the repression and silencing of women and their leaky ever-changing, endlessly cycling bodies: these bodies that change blood into food and bleed without dying and provide safe passage for new souls upon the earth. Sometimes the issue of a woman’s right not to breastfeed is framed as a feminist “choice.” This is a myth, made in the context of a society that places little value on women, children, and caregiving. It is society that needs to change. Not women and not babies.

Systemic and Structural Context

In an essay for the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine on “What does feminism have to do with breastfeeding?”, Maternal–fetal medicine specialist Dr. Alison Stuebe (2010) points out that for the most part feminist advocacy ignores breastfeeding and that most breastfeeding advocacy sidesteps the complicated contextual issues of women’s lives. Stuebe notes:

…the conventional wisdom is that breastfeeding is a maternal duty that forces women to eschew their career aspirations to fulfill some ideal of motherhood, while feminism is about liberating women from exactly those constraints. Case closed. Or is it?…The result is that women end up fighting among themselves about the choices our society forces us to make — motherhood or career? Breast or bottle? — instead of uniting to address the societal structures that prevent women from realizing their full potential.

Appropriately, Stuebe further notes that:

…breastfeeding is not a ‘choice.’  Breastfeeding is a reproductive right. This is a simple, but remarkably radical, concept. Here’s why: When we frame infant feeding as a choice made by an individual women, we place the entire responsibility for carrying out that choice on the individual woman…Indeed, the ultimate link between breastfeeding and feminism is that in a truly equitable society, women would have the capacity to fulfill to pursue both their productive and reproductive work without penalty.

And, in considering contextual and systemic issues that impact women every day, Stuebe points out that:

These issues transcend breastfeeding. Why, for example, do we pit “stay at home moms” against “working moms,” rather than demand  high-quality, affordable child care, flexible work, and paid maternity leave so that each woman can pursue both market work and caring work, in the proportion she finds most fulfilling? Why do we accept that, if a woman devotes all of her time to caring for her family, she does not earn any social security benefits, whereas if she gets a paying job and sends her children to day care, she and her day care provider earn credits toward financial security in old age? And why do we enact social policies that subsidize child care and require poor mothers to enter the paid work force, rather than support poor mothers to care for their own children?…

Naomi Wolf (2003) also addresses the myth of  “choice” regarding breastfeeding (specifically with regard to lack of support for breastfeeding while working outside the home) in her book Misconceptions: “…it was unconscionable for our culture to insist that women ‘choose’ to leave their suckling babies abruptly at home in order simply to be available for paid work.” (p. 270) Wolf also quotes Robbie Kahn who says, “the job market holds out an all-or-nothing prospect to new mothers: you can give your body and heart and lose much of your status, your money, your equality, and your income; or, you can keep your identity and your income—only if you abandon your baby all day long and try desperately to switch off the most powerful primal drive the human animal can feel.” And, then considering the argument that bottle feeding “liberates” women from the tyranny/restrictiveness of breastfeeding: “The liberation women need is to breastfeed free of social, medical, and employer constraints [emphasis mine]. Instead, they have been presented with the notion that liberation comes with being able to abandon breastfeeding without guilt. This ‘liberation,’ though, is an illusion representing a distorted view of what breastfeeding is, what breastfeeding does, and what both mothers and babies need after birth” (Michels, p. xxx). Often, not breastfeeding is a structural and systemic symptom of a patriarchal society that devalues women and caregiving work and views the masculine body as normative, not a personal choice!

I am a systems thinker and always hold in mind that breastfeeding, like all aspects of women’s lives, occurs in a context, a context that involves a variety of “circles of support” or lack thereof. Women don’t “fail” at breastfeeding because of personal flaws, society fails breastfeeding women and their babies every day through things like minimal maternity leave, no pumping rooms in workplaces, formula advertising and “gifts” in hospitals, formula company sponsorship of research and materials for doctors, the sexualization of breasts and objectification of women’s bodies, and so on and so forth. According to Milk, Money, and Madness (1995), “…infant formula sales comprise up to 50% of the total profits of Abbott Labs, an enormous pharmaceutical concern.” (p. 164) And the US government is the largest buyer of formula, paying for approximately 50% of all formula sold in the nation.

In a brilliant analysis of the politics of breastfeeding in the US, Milk, Money, and Madness (1995), by Dia Michels and Naomi Baumslag, the following salient points are made about why women in the US so often experience breastfeeding problems: “In western society, the baby gets attention while the mother is given lectures [emphasis mine]. Pregnancy is considered an illness; once the ‘illness’ is over, interest in her wanes. Mothers in ‘civilized’ countries often have no or very little help with a new baby. Women tend to be home alone to fend for themselves and the children. They are typically isolated socially and expected to complete their usual chores, including keeping the house clean and doing the cooking and shopping, while being the sole person to care for the infant…” (p. 17)

Michels and Baumslag go on to explain:

According to the US rules and regulations governing the federal worker, the pregnancy and postdelivery period is referred to as “the period of incapacitation.” This reflects the reality of a situation that should be called ‘the period of joy.’ Historically, mothering was a group process shared by the available adults. This provided not only needed relief but also readily available advice and experience. Of the “traditional” and “modern” child-rearing situations, it is the modern isolated western mom who is much more likely to find herself experiencing lactation failure [emphasis mine]. (p. 18)

There is a tendency for modern women to look inward and blame themselves for “failing” at breastfeeding. There is also an unfortunate tendency for other mothers to also blame the mother for “failing”—she was “too lazy” or “just made an excuse,” etc. We live in a bottle-feeding culture; the cards are stacked against breastfeeding from many angles–economically, socially, medically. When I hear women discussing why they couldn’t breastfeed, I don’t hear “excuses,” I hear “broken systems of support” (whether it be the epidural in the hospital that caused fluid retention and the accompanying flat nipples, the employer who won’t provide a pumping location, the husband who doesn’t want to share “his breasts”, or the mother-in-law who thinks breastfeeding is perverted). Of course, there can actually be true “excuses” and “bad reasons” and women theoretically always have the power to choose for themselves rather than be swayed by those around them, but there are a tremendous amount of variables that go into not breastfeeding, besides the quickest answer or what is initially apparent on the surface. As noted previously, breastfeeding occurs in a context and that context is often one that does not reinforce a breastfeeding relationship. In my seven years in breastfeeding support, with well over 800 helping contacts, I’ve more often thought it is a miracle that a mother manages to breastfeed, than I have wondered why she doesn’t.

The ecology of breastfeeding

A breastfeeding baby is the topmost point on the food chain (above other humans who consume other animals, because a breastfeeding baby is consuming a human product) and as such is deeply impacted by the body burden of chemicals stored by the mother. The book Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2003), Sandra Steingraber closely examines these factors in both an interesting and disturbing read. The body of the mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding is the natural “habitat” of the baby and our larger, very polluted environment has a profound impact on these habitats. Mothers have pesticide residues and dry cleaning chemicals, for example, in their breastmilk. The breastfeeding mother’s body is quite literally the maternal nest and a motherbaby is a single psychobiological organism. At an international breastfeeding conference in 2007, I was fortunate enough to hear Dr. Nils Bergman speak about skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding, and perinatal neuroscience. The summary version of his findings are that babies need to be with their mothers following birth in order to develop proper neural connections and ensure healthy brain development and proper brain “organization”; mother’s chest is baby’s natural post-birth “habitat” and is of vital developmental and survival significance; and that breastfeeding = brain wiring.

A baby has no concept of the notion of independence. Even though we live in a culture that pushes for independence at young ages, all babies are born hard-wired for connection; for dependence. It is completely biologically appropriate and is the baby’s first and most potent instinct. Mother’s body is baby’s home—the maternal nest. If a baby cries when her mother puts her down, that means she has a smart baby, not a “dependent” or “manipulative” one.

What happens when society and culture pollute the maternal nest? Is that mother and baby’s problem or is it a political and cultural issue that should be of top priority? Unfortunately, many politicians continue to focus on reproductive control of women, rather than on human and planetary health.

Antonelli (1994) explores women’s reproductive rights in this passage in The Politics of Women’s Spirituality:

Human life is valuable and sacred when it is the freely given gift of the Mother—through the human mother. To bear new life is a grave responsibility, requiring a deep commitment—one which no one can force on another. To coerce a woman by force or fear or guilt or law or economic pressure to bear an unwanted child is the height of immorality. It denies her right to exercise her own sacred will and conscience, robs her of her humanity, and dishonors the Goddess manifest in her being. The concern of the anti-abortion forces is not truly with the preservation of life, it is with punishment for sexuality [and devaluation of the female]. If there were genuinely concerned with life, they would be protesting the spraying of our forests and fields with pesticides known to cause birth defects. They would be working to shut down nuclear power plants and dismantle nuclear weapons, to avert the threat of widespread genetic damage which may plague wanted children for generations to come… (p. 420).

If we valued breastfeeding as the birthright of each new member of our species, we would not continue inventing new breastmilk substitutes that encourage mothers to abandon breastfeeding. We would not continue to pollute the earth, water, and sky and in so doing increase the body burden of hazardous chemicals carried by mother and child. We would not treat as normative workplaces that expect and champion mother–baby separation after a few scant weeks of maternity leave. We would not accept broken circles of support as, “just the way things are.” And, we would not settle for a world that continues to sicken its entire population by devaluing, dishonoring, dismissing, and degrading our own biological connection to the natural world. As Charlene Spretnak states in The Womanspirit Sourcebook (1988):

In a broader sense the term patriarchal culture connotes not only injustice toward women but also the accompanying cultural traits: love of hierarchical structure and competition, love of dominance-or-submission modes of relating, alienation from Nature, suppression of empathy or other emotions, and haunting insecurity about all of those matters. The spiritually grounded transformative power of Earth-based wisdom and compassion is our best hope for creating a future worth living. Women have been associated with transformative power from the beginning: we can grow people out of our very flesh, take in food and transform it into milk for the young. Women’s transformative wisdom and energy are absolutely necessary in the contemporary struggle for ecological sanity, secure peace, and social justice. (p. 90)

As Glenys Livingstone stated: “It is not female biology that has betrayed the female…it is the stories and myths we have come to believe about ourselves [emphasis mine].” (p. 78) The stories we have come to believe are many and have complicated roots in both patriarchal social structures and in feminist philosophies that fail to recognize the potent and profound sociocultural legacy represented by the transformation of women’s blood to milk to life

—

Molly Remer, MSW, ICCE, CCCE is a certified birth educator, writer, and activist who lives with her husband and children in central Missouri. She is the editor of the Friends of Missouri Midwives newsletter, a breastfeeding counselor, a professor of human services, and a doctoral student in women’s spirituality at Ocean Seminary College. She blogs about birth, motherhood, and women’s issues at https://talkbirth.me/.

This is a preprint version of the following article: Remer, M. (2012). Breastfeeding as an ecofeminist issue. Restoration Earth: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Nature & Civilization, 1(2), 34–39. Copyright © The Authors. All rights
reserved. For reprint information contact: oceanseminary@ verizon.net.

Click here for a typeset pdf version of the original article.

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References:

Antonelli, J. (1994). Feminist spirituality: The politics of the psyche. In C. Spretnak (Ed), The politics of women’s spirituality (p. 420) Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Baumslag, N., & Michels, D. (1995). Milk, money, and madness: The culture and politics of breastfeeding. Washington, DC, Bergin & Garvey Trade.

Spretnak, C. (1988). The womanspirit sourcebook. New York: Harpercollins.

Steingraber, S. (2003). Having faith: An ecologist’s journey to motherhood. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group.

Stuebe, A. (2010). What does feminism have to do with breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Medicine, http://bfmed.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/what-does-feminism-have-to-do-with-breastfeeding/ Retrieved on March 1, 2012.

Wolf, N. (2003). Misconceptions: Truth, lies, and the unexpected on the journal to motherhood. New York: Anchor Books.

For some more information about breastfeeding as an ecological issue, see this article: Nursing the World Back to Health, http://www.llli.org/nb/nbmayjun95p68.html