The Breastapo

I've posted a lot about my angst over not being able to produce enough milk for my baby. Most of my misery derives from the undisguised contempt I've witnessed on the part of certain medical professionals and breastfeeding zealots toward women who claim to have an inadequate supply. I was visiting a web board on breastfeeding and found a comment that sums up their attitude:

Wow, I have never seen so many excuses for quitting breastfeeding in my life. If all of you had babies several hundred years ago, would you have just let them starve??? Only 1-3% of women cannot medically breastfeed. And to the articles comment of, "I was exhausted from feeding the baby every hour" well that is what breastfed babies do. Both of my sons nursed every hour on the hour and sometimes sooner. Nature does not set it up for 70% of the women in the US to fail at breastfeeding. It is an interesting phenomenon that the "I didnt make enough milk" excuse happens mostly in THIS country. Breasts are supply and demand, feed more, produce more...simple as that..unless you are truly one of the 1-3% that cannot do it which is HIGHLY unlikely in most cases of "I didnt make enough milk" syndrome.

This post came courtesy of "Tiff," a member of what I've come to think of as The Breastapo. The Breastapo don't just breastfeed their own babies, they demand that everyone else does too. They reduce the enormously complex process of milk production, delivery, intake, and digestion to "feed more, produce more" and scoff at any woman who meekly suggests that it wasn't that simple for her. They assume that the psychological effects of feeding every hour for months -- which would almost certainly lead to serious psychological problems due to profound sleep deprivation -- are inconsequential. They don't seem to know their history -- that hundreds of years ago people used wet nurses when they couldn't or didn't want to breastfeed -- and have almost no understanding of the cultural factors involved in nursing. They also don't seem to realize that the infant mortality rate in other countries and in this country several hundred years ago is/was frighteningly high. Women who didn't produce enough milk and who didn't have access to wet nurses probably had babies who died or were sickly until they could eat solid food.

"Tiff"'s comments about all the excuses women have for not breastfeeding in the U.S. reveal that she thinks American women are self-centered and lazy. What she completely overlooks is that American women, more than ever before, are going it alone. Most of us no longer live with our families of origin, so we don't have mothers and sisters and grandmothers in the community to prepare our meals and clean our houses while we breastfeed every hour on the hour. One of my grad students, a woman from China, was appalled that I was back in the office a few weeks after my baby was born. She said that in China, a new mother simply stays home and feeds for 6 months while her family cares for her. I told her things aren't that way in America. She said, "How do you cope??" Good question. Stress and lack of rest affect milk supply; I know that both have been major factors in my own struggle with milk production.

The irony here is that just about every member of The Breastapo I've met is female. This is yet another case of women being each other's fiercest critics. Stay-at-home-moms and working moms fight about who's raising their children correctly, when they could be banding together to demand reliable, safe, low-cost daycare from our governing bodies. Women instead of men quit their jobs to be full-time parents based on the rationale that their men's salaries are larger, instead of asking why women are paid less than men for the same work. And when it comes to breastfeeding, women sit there battling each other over the evils of formula supplementation instead of lobbying collectively for extended, paid parental leave so early parenthood would be less stressful. The problem with American culture isn't that we're self-centered and lazy, it's that we're freaking exhausted. And isolated. And, consequently, depressed and ashamed. And if we can be coerced to direct what energy we have left in battle against each other, then we have no energy to demand policy changes that would enrich our lives and those of our children. This has always been our problem in the struggle for pro-women legislation: divided we fall.

The smart woman makes her decisions based on what she knows is best for herself and her family. Unfortunately some of us take a while to figure out what that is. I think I'd better stay away from those breastfeeding boards and just keep repeating my mantra: fur monkey, fur monkey, fur monkey...