(Image: Still from Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Woody Allen, 1972)It started in a cab ride home from a doctors appointment.
I was seven months pregnant. The cab driver could barely speak English. He looked me over and asked if I planned to breast feed. He said his wife breast fed all their children and they never got sick. I told him I thought that was great. Really though, I just wanted him to mind his own business. And keep his eyes on the road.
What passed for well-meaning chatter felt like verbal groping.
After my daughter Eve was born, my husband and I have tried to get out of the house about once a week for a civilized meal with the baby. In the first few months, civility was maintained with a bottle of expressed breast milk. But the bottle attracts some negative attention. More than one person has asked “What’s in that?” -- both friends and strangers. I tell them. They relax. But jeez. It’s not a freaking cigarette.
I started talking about this with friends, including a policy professional focused on women’s issues. She sees it as a class issue. She says breast feeding campaigns have had a hard time reaching moms with less money. Race may be a factor. But I also know several professional moms who formula feed -- generally after efforts to nurse fail for one reason or another. Just last night I had a dream a stranger offered my child what looked like frozen breast milk ... or was it? Why would someone freeze formula? Even creepier -- why would someone without a baby keep breast milk on hand in their freezer? Very Brothers Grimm.
While I understand all the benefits of nursing, I think the social pressure to breast feed can be really counterproductive. I know more than one woman who has been unable to nurse pushed toward depression. One became a professional post-partum therapist. Another woman had a feeding tube attached to her breasts to simulate nursing. Her nipples bled at the point of attachment. There are videos of this on YouTube. Someone commented "I don't understand."
I think I do. When agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization champion breast feeding, and respected sources claim nursing increases IQ and immunities, mothers want to give their children every advantage. Science supports it. And for women who choose to nurse, we need all the support we can get. It can be challenging. Thankfully, there are a lot of support groups, at least where I live.
But unlike other behavioral health decisions like safe sex or not smoking, the reasons for not breastfeeding can be outside of a woman’s control. The consequences are far from catastrophic. My pediatrician told me that formula today is completely satisfactory and is approaching the quality of breast milk minus the immunity-boosters. He said this while Eve was recovering from jaundice (more prevalent in breast fed babies) and before my milk production could keep up with demand (during the first few weeks). She was losing too much weight. We were really worried.
Exhausted from labor, two hospital stays, and four completely sleepless nights, I appreciated a sympathetic professional opinion. The information and the tone of its delivery helped me relax and feel okay about supplementing my own supply with a little formula when necessary. Turned out, it wasn’t necessary for very long at all once I stopped feeling pressured.
While I understand that breast feeding is ideal, and that its advocates need to fight hard (specifically for working mothers who need a place to pump in the office), I think great harm can be done by judging women who formula-feed. Whether or not an infant is nursed or formula-fed seems much less important than well-balanced, well-rested and responsive parenting.
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