Sadly, it looks like the New York Times is going to add a new dimension to its ongoing "coverage" of The Mommy Wars: breastfeeding. The following article appears today as the top item in the health section:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/health/13brea.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin (requires login.)
It's about the onoing public health campaigns that have gone from not just promoting breastfeeding to actively suggesting it is risky not to breastfeed. Unfortunately, the whole tone of the article is more akin to a Style Section article rather than one in Health. What really got me riled up, though, was that the only breastfeeding mother they interviewed was a stay-at-home mother who described breastfeeding as a "whole lifestyle" and said "my life basically revolves around my kids."
This is my big issue: you don't have to quit your job, stay home with your children, or develop a lifestyle that revolves around them to successfully breastfeed for 6 months. Of course, if you WANT to do those things, go right ahead. But I would like to see the public image of the breastfeeding woman move beyond the stay-at-home mother/lactivist to include the high school student who has in-school child care and can breastfeed between classes; the nurse who works three 12-hour overnight shifts a week and manages to pump anyway; and, say, me, who worked full-time from the time my daughter was 3 months old, and kept nursing her until she was two and a half. With very little sacrifice (well, except for the whole sleep thing, which, let's not talk about that, shall we, and it's not clear to what extent that was associated with breastfeeding, although I think there was some connection.)
A small percentage of women are biologically incapable of breastfeeding, or of producing enough milk, or have some other fundamental mismatch with their child (who also may have biological problems with nursing.) But 30% of women never try to breastfeed. And of those women who do try, the demographic of those who succeed skews towards the wealthy, the white, and the well-educated (with some interesting hiccups - hispanic women are quite likely to breastfeed, *because they live in a culture that supports it.*) The key paragraph in the article is this one:
"Moreover, urging women to breast-feed exclusively is a tall order in a country where more than 60 percent of mothers of very young children work, federal law requires large companies to provide only 12 weeks' unpaid maternity leave and lactation leave is unheard of. Only a third of large companies provide a private, secure area where women can express breast milk during the workday, and only 7 percent offer on-site or near-site child care, according to a 2005 national study of employers by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute."
Indeed. And this paragraph only addresses practical, political and economic obstacles to breastfeeding, not the cultural ones (when your mother says, "it's disgusting; it makes you saggy." When your pediatrician says you have to give the baby formula, because she's 2 days old and hasn't regained her birth weight, but, you know, most mothers haven't had their milk come in on the second day - how the hell was the baby supposed to regain birth weight??). An advertising campaign isn't going to solve this public health problem; the only women who notice it are the wealthy white women who are already, as a rule, on board with the idea that breastfeeding is good; the ones who do it feel smug and the ones who don't or can't feel guilty. What we need is widespread societal change. Get on that, will you, Department of Health and Human Services?
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