The Politics Of Breastfeeding
by Gabrielle Palmer (2009)
Recommended by Kris
I have never breastfed,
nor have I ever been breastfed. (I will resist saying ‘and I turned out okay’
because, obviously, that is debatable.) Thus, my opinions of the subject are
not grounded in any practical experience.
Doesn’t mean I don’t have any,
though.
The benefits of
breastfeeding are incontrovertible and to deny them would be stupid.
I totally believe that it is a natural process and women should be supported to
breastfeed both by healthcare systems and society at large (with the vested
commercial interests of artificial milk companies kept at bay). However, what I
do get troubled by in breastfeeding dogma is that it’s sometimes accompanied by
an implicit (or even explicit) judgement against women who can’t breastfeed, or
who choose not to. For me, the narrative can run perilously close to an
antifeminist biology-is-destiny outlook, where a woman is expected to do
nothing but serve her family.
The Politics Of Breastfeeding, I hoped,
would give me an insight into how an innate procedure had become such a charged
and emotive issue. Why should I feel that something that is such an intrinsic
part of being female can be and is used against women?
It is clear from the
outset that Palmer is far from a neutral chronicler of breastfeeding.
In this book I examine the political reasons for a
situation which has a profound effect on the whole world from the major
economic effects of squandering a natural resource to the individual misery of
a sick child or an unhappy woman.
Political reasons analysed
by Palmer include the desire of governments to support big business, gender stereotyping,
exploitation of the developing world, the sexualisation of culture and,
ultimately, the structure of capitalism itself.
Breastfeeding, she broadly
argues, is denigrated because women are denigrated in society, partly because
of their collectively lower economic contribution: child rearing, at least
initially, takes women out of work. Individual men and other women can be
supportive, but there is a general lack of will to change this situation
because breastfeeding is also in tension with free market economies. Breastmilk, after all, regulates its own supply and demand, no
money is exchanged, and it cannot be bettered by a substitute. It is thus
immune to market forces – or it should be.
Much as they urge us to think otherwise, the infant feeding product
companies are not philanthropic organisations, but competitive commercial
enterprises. It is in their interests that women find it difficult to
breastfeed.
Palmer is especially and
justifiably critical of artificial milk company policies in the developing
world. Here, she looks at the Nestle baby milk scandal. The company gave free
samples in hospitals, using salespeople dressed as nurses on maternity wards, disrupting the appetite of the baby
for breastmilk, and then – with a baby dependent on formula – began to charge
for the product. Not only did this get mothers to introduce a pointless and
expensive substitute, it caused infant death and disease since the immunising
effect of breastmilk was lost. Read the powerful 1975 pamphlet The Baby Killer.
So, is this all of
historical interest only? Since 2003, when the World Health Organisation and
UNICEF published The Global Strategy For Infant And Young Child Feeding (‘the code’), all national
governments have been compelled to promote breastfeeding, and this includes
protecting it from aggressive unethical marketing by artificial baby food
companies. However, it hasn’t stemmed marketing of breastmilk substitutes; Palmer
now looks at the subtler strategies of today, both in the developed and
developing world. These comply with the letter of the code, while violating its
spirit. Tactics include retaining the name ‘formula’ – conferring a scientific
and medical aura to the product – to the creation of ‘follow-on milk’ and its
association with very happy and healthy babies. She convincingly argues that
the powerful images created by adverts such as this one, below, work to
undermine medical advice for exclusive breastfeeding.
A less successful argument for me was
when Palmer tackled how women see their own bodies.
Her [a woman’s] perception of her own breasts may be as
sexual objects. She may value them herself in this way and feel some anxiety
that breastfeeding may take away their sexiness. For many women, displaying the
allure of their bodies might be the one time they feel powerful.
Damn right they’re sexual
objects! It’s not my perception;
Palmer implies in this section that a woman who enjoys her breasts in an
autoerotic way, or who loves partners exploring them, has somehow internalized a
male way of looking at her body.
They [women] have been programmed to perceive suckling
as a sexual activity performed by adults.
I haven’t been 'programmed' to perceive anything of the sort. It feels
nice to do that.
I believe there is an argument to be made here: that the
aggressive sexualised culture we are in means the breast is treated as an
erotic plaything, and that breastfeeding is so troubling to some because it
highlights the breast’s other (practical) fuction. But if Palmer was driving at
this, she fails to express it clearly; and her near-denial of the especial
sexual pleasure found in the breast is plain wrong.
I was also angered by her
analysis of feminism and breastfeeding.
Some 1970s feminists had ambivalent attitudes to their
bodies and reproduction. In the striving for equality, some women came to scorn
birth and breastfeeding.
I absolutely disagree with
this sweeping statement. Reproductive rights – from abortion to paid maternity
leave – were cornerstones of 1970s feminism. The fight for women to control
their own bodies encompassed supporting a woman to give birth, and to
breastfeed unimpeded if she so chose. But because some women decided not to – for any number of
reasons – doesn’t mean they had ‘ambivalent attitudes' to their bodies. I would
say these women had a very clear attitude to their bodies. For instance, Palmer
brings up Shulamith Firestone who wrote, in 1970's The Dialectic Of Sex, that reproduction and child-rearing should be
as artificial as possible.
Now Firestone’s argument
for laboratory reproduction is a nuanced one. It is part of her analysis of how
the family, and reproduction, oppress women in culture. Creating and raising
children outside of women’s bodies and the traditional family unit, Firestone
argues, will help eradicate the gender differences used to subjugate. Now this
wasn’t (and still isn’t) a mainstream viewpoint, but Palmer dismisses and mocks
Firestone without covering her argument properly, and this does her a great
disservice.
Palmer’s use of the first
person, and her reliance on anecdotes alongside research, generally sat ill with me. It
was more conversational than I would have liked, and the overall book structure
wasn’t too logical. There were also areas that she didn’t cover that I feel
would have enhanced the book: for instance, it would have been interesting to
understand more about the link with cancer prevention (and to look at a different
image of the breast: as a site of disease and death).
But, I’m glad I read this:
I feel more informed about how breastfeeding has become imbued with dozens of
meanings over the years, many of which damage women. I suppose, not being a
mother, and never having talked to my own mother about this, I look at the
issue from a societal point of view over a child right perspective. Seeing the
strands of this book that I’ve teased out in this post confirms
this.
Kris herself is very
eloquent in discussions of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. I don’t always
agree with her viewpoints, or she with mine (but that’s the beautiful milk of
life). She more than puts her money where her mouth is: Kris works tirelessly
to support women in the transition to motherhood, and helps them to experience
positive birth and parenting.
I remember my favourite
Kris moment. Someone trotted out the line about how people get more
conservative as they become parents. Kris fixed her with a steady glance, and
said that no, certainly not in her case. On the contrary, Kris said she had
become more radical because parenting made her question societal ‘givens’. She
thought far more about the world her daughter was now part of.
It’s really hard to stand up
to inequality, especially if the first task is to convince that there even is an inequality. Those who are driven
and articulate enough to do this are rare. Kris is one of them.
