Jennifer Block Responds to "The Case Against Breastfeeding"

Hannah Rosin recently wrote a controversial article called The Case Against Breastfeeding. Here are some insightful exerpts from Jennifer Block's (speaking at the conference I'll be attending!) response:

We tell women that breast is best, we tell them to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months, we even tell them it will raise their kid's IQ (and we should give that a rest), and then we send them home with formula samples, or with a baby whose throat is too sore to suckle, or a mom whose milk is delayed because of surgery, and we don't teach technique, and we are offended when a woman breastfeeds in public, so we make her feel housebound, and we don't give a mother and her partner paid leave, and we send her to go back to a workplace without on-site childcare, and so her only alternative to formula is to plug her nipples into a machine, and if she's lucky she gets periodic breaks and a "non-bathroom lactation room" in which to pump, and if she's not she gets a toilet, and so on and so forth.

But it's not that these public health recommendations are grounded in some return-to-the-1950s conspiracy, as Rosin suggests; they're grounded in physiology. And science is validating the physiology of the mother-baby dyad — that is, both are healthier when they remain close to each other during the first several months postpartum. It's not simply the milk that's inimitable; it's the mothering. (Indeed, "We actually don't know if feeding infants human milk has the same benefits as breastfeeding," says Labbok.) And mothering is something that our culture does not value enough to support. It is this dissonance between physiology and culture that has women so frustrated, and feminists like Rosin grasping at the bottle as a proxy for equality.

Why did American feminism evolve in such a way that we think of biology as destiny, and that destiny as a prison? Why are we so willing to surrender the parts and processes that makes us female rather than demanding that society support them? We've broken down doors and cracked glass ceilings, when what we need to do is redesign the building.

Labbok, who's worked in some fifty countries, tells me the feminists in northern Europe have done this. "In northern Europe, women fight for the right to breastfeed," she says. There, feminism isn't just about "making women act more like men," the right of women to be full citizens and the right of babies to be given best possible care are not at odds. "There's an understanding of human rights outside the U.S. that includes the right of women to breastfeed. And that means women shouldn't be expected to do it unless everyone is fully supporting it — her family, her society, her workplace, everybody all the way down the line to her government."