The Breast Offense nytimes.com
This is one you should enjoy, Neocon.
But even with some 6,600 board-certified lactation consultants practicing in this
country, and with the decidedly mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics
recommending that mothers nurse their children for at least 12 months and even
beyond, "if mutually desired," American women still lag behind many of their foreign
counterparts when it comes to willingness to initiate and sustain breast-feeding.
According to data compiled by the Population Reference Bureau, 95 percent of
women surveyed in 63 developing nations breast-feed their children. In Burkina
Faso, the median age of weaning is 25 months; in Peru, it's 20 months; in Nepal, it's
31; while in the United States, most children are weaned at or before 6 months.
American breast-feeding practices are most closely mirrored in parts of Europe,
where it is estimated that almost half the mothers in France and less than a third in
Ireland breast-feed at all. By contrast, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have some
of the highest breast-feeding rates in the world.
According to Dia Michels, co-author of "Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture
and Politics of Breastfeeding," Scandinavians view breast-feeding as an
unquestionable imperative. Not long ago, Michels says, she attended a wedding
reception in Sweden where she was introduced to other guests as a breast-feeding
advocate. "They looked at me like I was insane," she recalls. "Like, why would
anyone need to be a breast-feeding advocate? It was like walking into an American
party and saying: 'Hi, I'm Dia! I represent toothbrushing!"'
But what may be a rote health issue in other cultures remains inherently confused in
ours, as breast-feeding is most often regarded as a lifestyle choice. According to
Michels, this is because Americans are more likely to accept infant formula as an apt
substitute for breast milk. The American impulse to buy formula, she asserts, is
driven by our worship of variety. "We've established this notion that money buys
freedom," she says. "We feel empowered in making choices, and using formula is an
exercise of choice."
In strictly capitalist terms, breast-feeding doesn't qualify as productive either.
Against the backdrop of a get-it-done society, a number of women grapple with a
sense that they're "doing nothing" while breast-feeding. "The nurturing of children,
including breast-feeding, is not seen as an accomplishment," says Cynthia Good
Mojab, research associate for the breast-feeding advocacy group La Leche League
International. For many women, a return to work often marks the end of
breast-feeding, and these days, as record numbers of mothers go back to work
within a year of their children's births, weaning comes earlier than most pediatricians
recommend.
In her work as a lactation consultant, Smythe has watched mothers struggle to find
the time and privacy necessary to pump milk on the job. For the first year of her
oldest daughter's life, she, too, carted a breast pump to and from her work as a
residential-life director at a local university. "I understand the challenges," she says.
"But there are a lot of women who manage to nurse and keep up high-powered
careers."
Still, statistics show that there are many who don't. The forces of maternal guilt being
inestimable, failing to breast-feed possibly serves as one more thing mothers use to
browbeat themselves, while subtle and not-so-subtle cultural messages often hurry
the weaning process. According to Elizabeth Baldwin, a Miami lawyer who specializes in
breast-feeding cases, women often see their breast-feeding practices used against them,
particularly while negotiating child custody during divorce settlements or, as was the case
in Illinois last summer, in child-welfare cases. While more than 20 states currently protect a
woman's right to breast-feed in public, it's still not unusual for a nursing mother to
find herself confronted by security guards or an irate store manager and asked to
move her breast-feeding to the bathroom. "We continually chastise and punish
women for doing exactly what we've recommended they do," Baldwin says.
Now, where would those security guards and irate store managers get such a harebrained idea? |
