The Curious Politics of Milk

Sonia Shah

 

Part One

One night, a small American boy slipped into bed with his mother and suckled at her breast for a few minutes before dropping off to sleep. The next day, he told his babysitter he wanted to stop doing so, but "Mommy wouldn't let me." The child was swiftly removed from his mother into foster care for 6 months.

Unlike Toni Morrison's character Milkman, who suckled at his mother's breast past puberty, this small boy was just 5 years old. As one outraged letter writer noted, "substitute the more prosaic 'blankie' for the sadly misunderstood breast and you would see a child torn between the safety and comfort of his babyhood and the risk and adventure of being a big boy."

Breastfeeding was nearly universal in the United States until about the 1930s, when bottle-feeding with substitutes became the norm. Since the 1970s, tireless campaigns by breastfeeding advocates have reversed this trend, and today about three-quarters of the U.S. educated elite breastfeed their babies. But suckling is still considered acceptable only for infants. Babies as small as two- and three-years-old have been whisked away from their mothers, deemed dangerous for nursing them.

Although the agency that initially removed the 5-year-old child claimed he was suffering "sexual abuse" because of the nursing, the judge in the case claimed the real problem was one of needs. "His needs were being ignored…[his mother] continued to put her own parental needs first." "Breastfeeding an older child can fulfill many needs," author Pat Love was quoted as saying in another article on the case. "The question is: whose needs are being met?"

In other words, if a woman's needs are being met by nursing her children, she must be doing something wrong.

We humans are probably the only mammals to turn our signature act into a political circus. According to anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, lactation is the key to women's biological destiny, even more than her sex, for it is the only part of caretaking that is so profoundly sex-related. (Some feminist anthropologists have claimed that women turn to bottle-feeding so as to even the scales--instead of women using their bodily resources to feed the young, men use their financial resources to buy bottles. ) Groups of females with their sisters, grown daughters and infants are the most common form of mammalian social group--a grouping necessary for successful lactation--and probably the environment in which social intelligence itself evolved, Hrdy says.

The 1970s resurgence of interest in breastfeeding ("breast is best") spouted a font of research on the healing powers of human milk. As a kind of fortified sweat, human milk is uniquely adapted to support newborns, especially in times of local scarcities, for even an undernourished woman can adequately nourish a newborn with her milk. Breastfeeding is nearly universal in war-ravaged Rwanda, for instance; breastmilk kept a 6-week-old alive for a full week buried under the rubble of the Gujurat earthquake.

Today, many advocates speak and write about human milk as if it were an altogether magical substance. The decision not to breastfeed--taken by about 40 percent of American mothers today --is deemed "withholding" a "perfect food" from hungry and helpless babies. In their book on the culture and politics of breastfeeding, authors Naomi Baumslag and Dia Michels attribute bottle-feeding to "infatuation with technology and consumerism."

In other words, if a woman's needs are being met by NOT nursing her children, she must be doing something wrong.

Part Two

While UNICEF and WHO, among others, have been charting a decline in worldwide breastfeeding rates, the truth is that, like sexual practices, scholars and advocates really don't know much about why or how women choose to feed their infants.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (which recommends breastfeeding for 12 months), "the examples used to illustrate the decrease [in the developing world] are methodologically flawed; they use nonrepresentative or noncomparable samples, for example, or make implicit assumptions about past breastfeeding practices." WHO noted a similar concern. "As interest in the subject increased, so did the number of reports of the decline of breast-feeding in different parts of the Third World. Unfortunately many of these tended to be more anecdotal than scientifically based." For example, one influential study asserting a decline in breastfeeding in developing countries is based on trends in Japan and among Indian immigrants to Britain.

Most developing nations don't collect nationally representative data on breastfeeding practices--and even if they did, anthropologists say, their methods (questionnaires, surveys of women in clinics, etc.) wouldn't elicit a truthful picture. The few countries that have been studied by Western scientists are, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, "in no way representative of the entire developing world." World Health Organization and World Fertility Studies carried out in the 1970s found nearly universal (over 90 percent) breastfeeding among all classes in developing countries, except for urban elites in some countries (and the urban poor in one country.) Still, a study published in 1984 assessing the available data on breastfeeding trends and infant health concluded that a "downward trend exists" in the 7 developing countries under consideration. But the study goes on to note that the decline in breastfeeding per se is among elites; otherwise whatever decline was discerned was in the duration of breastfeeding.

Although UNICEF's 2000 State of the World's Children report doesn't provide statistics segregated by socioeconomic class, it does report that about 2/3 of the infants in sub-Saharan African and Asian countries, with the world's leading infant mortality rates, are breastfed. Medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, director of the Human Lactation Center and author of a one of a handful of in-depth anthropological studies of breastfeeding in the developing world , calls UNICEF's statistics "awful." "It is one of the great outrages that these huge organizations all over the world make these statements," she said in an interview. "They have no idea" how women are actually feeding their infants.

Raphael is the author of the classic 1976 book on breastfeeding, The Tender Gift, in which she popularized the term "doula" to refer to the woman who "mothers the mother" while she is breastfeeding. These doulas, Raphael found, were crucial to successful breastfeeding. They take on the mother's workload in the first few months of the newborn's life, so women have the time necessary to recover and nurse their infants. In her anthropological studies of 6 traditional and urban-poor cultures, she found that nursing women often hailed from breastfeeding cultures, where various rituals and traditions give new mothers extra time, extra food, and extra help during the first months of her new baby's life.

Raphael also found, conversely, that when women moved into situations where those rituals and traditions were not practiced--in economies that are being transformed by immigration, urbanization, and industrialization--the duration and occurrence of breastfeeding drops radically. These non-breastfeeders were not "infatuated with consumerism and technology" as breastfeeding advocate Naomi Baumslag and others would have it. On the contrary, they were poor and struggling. They had to work outside the home in order for their families to survive. They didn't have family nearby or available to help with childcare or with their other responsibilities. They lived in places where they couldn't strap the baby to their backs and take them to their jobs as maids, waitresses, or in the factory. For these women, the availability of adequate alternatives to breastmilk--condensed milk, powdered milk, and milk formula--meant they were able to keep their babies alive. (Raphael and others also found that women living under scarcity--in poverty or disaster conditions--universally breastfed their infants, as no other options were available, and finally and most significantly, that women have been feeding infants foods and drinks other than breastmilk, even in the first few weeks of life, for centuries.)

But women who don't breastfeed, or who wean their infants early to meet their own needs--surviving in an industrialized, global economy within dislocated, changing cultures--face an onslaught of moral opprobrium. They will kill their babies! development officials say.

In my next commentary, I'll look at the campaign against infant formula and how globalization and industrialization impact the politics of breastfeeding.

 Next Time…Part Three…