Tag Archives: breastfeeding

Bogus Science, Outright Lies, and the Social Control of Mothers

Laurie and Debbie say:

you-are-what-you-eat-MAIN

If you watch TV in Brazil, you will see a series of ads that

depict a baby suckling on an unhealthy food instead of a breast.

One ad features a baby nursing on a burger, the second has an baby feeding on a doughnut, and the third has an infant nursing from a cup of soda. “Your child is what you eat,” reads the campaign’s tagline in large cursive letters across the woman’s chest. “Your habits in the first thousand days of gestation can prevent your child from developing serious diseases,” it continues.

The ads, which are outright lies, are sponsored by the Sociedad de Pediatrica de Rio Grande del Sul, so a Brazilian mother may not realize she is being lied to, and threatened.

(Parenthetically, gestation is about 270 days. If it’s a mistranslation, and they mean the first 1,000 days of life, you would still have to breastfeed until the child was three for that number to be useful. But that’s a side issue.)

More important, only a few substances are known to cross the breast milk barrier, and they don’t include sugar and fat. According to Diana West of La Leche League, the body’s milk production is designed to be relatively consistent so that the nutrients in whatever food a mother consumes go first into the milk. If there is any nutritional deficit, it will be experienced by the mother. “She’s the one that gets robbed, not the milk,” said West.

So what are the pediatricians really doing? Let’s look at another example, this one from the U.S.

think-2

… almost all public health campaigns, whether sponsored by states, social movement organizations, public health institutes, or the associations of alcohol purveyors tell pregnant women not to drink alcohol during, before, or after pregnancy… at all… or else.

If you’ve heard of fetal alcohol syndrome, this sounds like reasonable advice … until you dig into the numbers.

… only about 5% of women give birth to babies who are later diagnosed with FAS. This means that many mothers drink excessively, and many more drink somewhat (at least 16 percent of mothers drink during pregnancy), and yet many, many children born to these women show no diagnosable signs of FAS. Twin studies, further, have shown that sometimes one fraternal twin is diagnosed with FAS, but the other twin, who shared the same uterine environment, is fine.

So, drinking during pregnancy does not appear to be a sufficient cause of FAS, even if it is a necessary cause (by definition?)

The article on mothers and alcohol goes on to quote a 12-year-old (!) book by Elizabeth M. Armstrong, Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility, which identifies a host of co-factors in fetal alcohol syndrome, including “poverty, malnutrition, high parity [i.e., having lots of children], and advanced maternal age.”

So, again, telling mothers that they must not drink at all during pregnancy is an outright lie. Even telling them that excessive drinking usually leads to FAS would be an outright lie.

What purpose do these lies serve?

First, like so many other things, they serve to control women. We know as feminists that when women gain power, huge efforts are immediately applied to curb that power. Just as acceptable sizes for women get smaller and smaller as women’s power gets bigger, acceptable behavior for women (in this case mothers) gets more and more constrained as more and more women take control of their lives (including their choice to have children).

Second, they prey upon the vulnerability of new mothers. Pregnant women and new mothers have long been known to be the most “compliant” population the medical profession sees. No one wants to feel like what’s wrong with her new baby is her fault, so if you tell her something she can do to prevent a possible problem, she’s very likely to take you seriously. (Isn’t “compliant” an interesting word in this context?)

Third, it continues the social trend to move “sin” away from harming others, acting violently, or other historical sinful acts and toward what we consume, what we eat and drink. It’s very convenient for the power structure if we worry more about what we put into our mouths than what they put into their pockets.

Finally, as we are learning to see everywhere, it takes the focus off the ways we as a society translate social problems into individual problems. It’s so much easier, and cheaper, and less demanding for us to tell pregnant women not to drink than for us to look at the issues of poverty and malnutrition. It’s so much more facile to tell nursing mothers not to eat fast food than it is to think about what food they have available, what choices are within their budget, and who is paying for the baby’s needs.

Shaming isn’t just cruel (though it is cruel); it’s also extremely convenient for the capitalists.

Barriers to Breastfeeding: Disappointing but Not Surprising

Debbie says:

I was born in 1951. My mother wanted to breastfeed me, but breastfeeding was completely out of fashion among affluent white people. Her doctor said, “Well, go ahead, I guess, but I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about it.” So when she ran into issues, she asked the the Black women at the bus stop, waiting to go home from their jobs as cleaning ladies and maids in the Jewish neighborhood of Baltimore where I was born. They apparently thought she was kind of dumb, but were very helpful. (I never asked her why she didn’t ask her mother …)

Breastfeeding_paolopatruno9Photo by Paolo Patruno.

Things change. Now breastfeeding is what affluent White mothers do, and harder for working, unemployed, or impoverished Black mothers. And bearing in mind that not every mother can breastfeed, and not every  mother wants to breastfeed, there’s no doubt that parents and babies are well served by having breastfeeding as an option.

According to the United States Breastfeeding Committee, one of the leading experts
on the current state of breastfeeding in the U.S., breastfeeding is the “most effective
global public health intervention for child survival.” Breast milk provides critical
nutrients to babies when they need them the most, supporting a variety of early
developments in the body, including brain development. It also transfers necessary
antibodies from mother to child that protect against disease, and wards off other early
childhood dangers such as SIDS and asthma.
The Center for Social Inclusion has released a long, detailed report in .pdf form, detailing the issues that contribute to making breastfeeding challenging. Two things make this report especially important: first, the focus on structural racism:
Often, when we think about racism, we focus on individual attitudes or behaviors,
which is important. Sometimes, we look at how particular institutions treat people of
different races differently, which is also important. But to truly understand the root
causes of racial inequity and thereby produce solutions that work for everyone, we
need to take a structural race approach. That means looking at the First Food system
through the lens of policies, institutions, and people—together.
and second, the storytelling style, focusing on three fictional mothers:
Sarah is White and lives in a suburb of Detroit. Her husband is a doctor at the nearby
hospital, and she volunteers full-time for a local nonprofit. Nicole is Black and lives in a
small town in Alabama. She is a teacher at the middle school and her husband is earning
his MSW through online classes at the University of Alabama. Lara is Latina and lives in
Los Angeles with her husband and mother. She and her husband both work for (and met
through) the city’s transit agency; her mother runs the home and receives Social Security.
The report follows all three women through their breastfeeding journey, interlacing their stories with statistics and information about breastfeeding in their various communities. The information is detailed, clear, and excellent, and the conclusions are convincing.
At each stage, smart policy interventions with robust implementation can make it easier
for all women to choose to breastfeed if they want to.
We seek policy interventions that truly address the root causes that are linked to
breastfeeding outcomes, especially lower rates for women of color. We know that
no single policy alone can dismantle structural inequity. This takes reform, including
diversification of the medical sector and those providing services, as well as changes to
and better implementation and promotion of existing policies like the ACA breastfeeding
provisions. But it also takes transformation, including directing funding streams to
challenge all barriers at the neighborhood level. We therefore need a variety of policy
and practice interventions that support women and communities of color to truly achieve
higher breastfeeding rates for all mothers.
The report goes on to detail these interventions; read the whole thing.
Why is breastfeeding a body image issue? For me, it’s because breasts have been fetishized, banned, turned into objects of the male gaze, commodified, judged, and generally objectified, often at the expense of remembering their biological function. So it’s important to me to remember what breasts do and more important that anyone who wants to be able to provide food for their babies from their breasts should be supported in doing so.