The Backlash to Breast is Best
Why exactly is breastfeeding under attack?
by Jennifer Block
April 21, 2009
The worldwide "Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative" is a great campaign — get the baby skin-to-skin with mom first thing after birth, leave
them be for an hour to start nursing, and basically phase out the nursery. A centerpiece of the initiative is to ban formula companies from giving out free samples in maternity wards. But perhaps calling it "baby friendly" was a bad idea. Perhaps it sends
the message that breastfeeding is somehow not "mother friendly."
That's essentially what Hannah Rosin argues in an article in this month's
Atlantic, "The Case Against Breastfeeding." (Babble ran a
similarly critical piece by Marjorie Ingall a few years back; it's still one of the "most viewed" articles). Rosin is a contributing editor and mother of three children, all of whom she breastfed, and the youngest of whom she is still breastfeeding, she
has said — the several thousand words denouncing its health benefits notwithstanding — "because it's nice."
Rosin's case against breastfeeding isn't so much that it's a pain, like housework. It's that it is holding women back,"stuck at home," like housework. She actually compares breastfeeding for the full year recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics to the vacuum cleaner of Betty Friedan's day, a symbol of domestic imprisonment. "It was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my twenty-first-century sisters down," Rosin writes of her epiphany, "but another sucking sound."
Rosin starts questioning the "breast is best" pronouncements. And here the
article takes an unfortunate turn. Of course, breastfeeding is both luxury and burden for Rosin, because she works from home. One can sympathize with this "middle-class mother's prison," but in her effort to break the chains, she starts questioning the "breast is best" pronouncements and public health rhetoric that equates exclusive breastfeeding with rearing baby Einstein. And here the
article takes an unfortunate and irresponsible turn. Rosin stays up late one night reading "dozens" of journal articles and concludes that it's all a big lie — "magical thinking." The recommendations of the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and just about every health ministry across the globe; the claims that breastfeeding will make your kid smarter, happier, healthier; the idea that breastmilk is "liquid vaccine," you hear all these things, "and then you read the scientific literature,"
Rosin said on the Today show, "and frankly, there isn't the solid evidence you'd expect to support it."
That's not my understanding of the evidence, so I called Miriam Labbok, MD, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, whom I was surprised wasn't quoted in the article. Labbok has thirty-plus years in the field of maternal and child health, was recently senior advisor
to UNICEF on infant feeding, and lately she's been organizing
conferences on feminism and breastfeeding. Labbok called in NPR to rebut Rosin (she's has been on quite the media tour) and cosigned a letter to the
Atlantic along with two dozen other researchers and advocates: "The online review of the medical literature described in the article misrepresents the evidence . . . " it reads. The American Academy of Pediatrics also responded: "The
evidence for the value of breastfeeding is scientific, it is strong, and it is continually being reaffirmed by new research work."
About the Author
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Jennifer Block is the author of Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care (Da Capo 2007), and the blog Pushedbirth.com. Her articles and op-eds have appeared in the Village Voice, ELLE, The Nation, Mothering, the L.A. Times, and the Guardian. She's based in Brooklyn, NY. |
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