Harpers - The Tyranny of Breast Feeding

[saras]

10. It's one of those questions that was scientifically settled before the backwards march started...

It's better for the mom's health, it's better for the baby's health, it's better for the relationship, if someone who WANTS a child has a lifestyle that conflicts with this, they need a lifestyle change, poverty notwithstanding.

I think it's within the range of individual choice, but the idea that they're even comparable is largely due to the industry carefully picking what to study and what questions to ask. Places with more public-health science find different things than America, especially post-Reagan.

The article tells a counter-story - that of people rejecting postwar consumerism based on results rather than on politics - as though it was the main story, and consumerism was an accidental happenstance, a byproduct of progress rather than a willfully constructed antifeminist movement. The LaLeche League people discovered that not just formula, but the culture associated with it and babies, sucked. Other than that they were fairly typical fifties moms, immersed in the culture of their times except where it obviously failed. That is, they liked breast feeding because it was better, and they framed it in terms of mom and apple pie because that's how everybody thought, especially conservatives like them.

In a way we're lucky they framed it in a system that's so irrelevant and outdated. It's better for breastfeeding to be judged on its merits in the present than in whatever originally sourced it.

It has become the defining feature of a philosophy in which motherhood, and only motherhood, determines a woman’s status and her role in society

To me, this just seems bizarre, and the surrounding article doesn't help at all. The people who feel this way about motherhood (mostly the radical right) have generally little interest in the kind of nurturing involved in breastfeeding - in my experience, anyways, and they philosophically prefer industry and commercial products anyways.

Maybe other parts of the country are different, but nearly everyone I've known who has valued breastfeeding has been progressive, pro-women's rights, often feminist, sometimes radical feminist - but both of those in the SAME philosophy? I've seen it a few times in letters to the editor of Mothering magazine, but not in real life.

It's fairly typical of a certain school of postmodernists who basically hold progressives responsible for nearly all of fascism - they blame utopians for prisons, they ignore Skinner and Watson and blame Dewey for everything bad in education, and anything "feminist" that suggests there's more to the world than filling the male role, whether "female" or outside the male/female box, is reactionary and dominionist, especially humane child care - which to me says a lot more about THEIR purposes than their politics.

If that's your thing, it's typical Harpers' quality. If it's NOT your thing, check out LaLeche League's website for what they're doing this decade.

To me, motherhood is something like playing music, or being part of a successful political collective, or having a spiritual experience, or loving the experience of speed. Some people get it and some don't; the ones that do it aren't necessarily the ones that get it; the failures are obvious.