Breastfeeding and feminism

[user123098]

Hey
Not trying to be a GF or here to discuss merits of bf or ff but just interested in views - someone said to me tonight that bf is inherently anti feminist as it means men and women can't share domestic and caring load of looking after baby. It's a really interesting point as bf does mean men can't be as involved in feeding, potentially bonding etc
What do you think?

Why can't we praise women for BF? It's bloody hard work at times.

Do if men can't bond cos they can't breast feed, does that mean women who can't breast feed also can't bond?

Of course not and it is petty and spiteful to suggest it.

In fact I think the lack of recognition for how much women go through and how hard they work when they are pregnant, give birth and care for a new baby is a huge feminist issue. It's wholly unfeminist to say we shouldn't praise women for breastfeeding (or giving birth etc)

Why can't we praise women for BF? It's bloody hard work at times

That was not the time of your original posts. You talked about it being in women's interest. How can you set yourself to decide that if you are ignoring the individual experiences? Every time there is a bf post there are countless posters where it clearly was not in their interest.

As for health benefits I managed 2 maybe 3 months of absolute torture getting to the point I resented my son. I am extremely sceptical given he was born to well off , non- smoking, non- drinking, eating their 5 a day parents that this golden elixir would have made any difference given his general background. My son is 27- the last time he saw a doctor was when he had his MMR.

It's wholly unfeminist to say we shouldn't praise women for breastfeeding (or giving birth etc)

It is wholly unfeminist to set yourself up as better than other women because you enjoyed / found bf easy, or for that matter , possible.

As for praise the most extreme breast feeding mother I knew (fed until 3 years old) also smoked heavily throughout her pregnancy and after the birth- should she be praised? The golden elixir didn't help much to prevent the glue ear caused by her smoking.

I'm talking about women as a class Lass, I thought that much was clear.

There are health benefits to breastfeeding. That is a fact, one that is not negated by bad experiences.

I'm not in the habit of putting a disclaimer on every point I make on MN but if I had I'd have said "I believe it's in a woman's interest to breastfeed due to the numerous health benefits to her, but in the exception where any issues arise outweighs those benefits, in which case it is not in the interest in that individual mother's case

It is wholly unfeminist to set yourself up as better than other women because you enjoyed / found bf easy, or for that matter , possible

I think you need to stop making (wrong) assumptions about what I mean, and stop projecting your own issues. Breastfeeding not working out for you doesn't mean it still isn't the best option for many.

FWIW it was hell on fucking earth BF my DD. One of the worst times of my life in those early days. But thanks for the assumption

You can't look at individual examples when it comes to things like health stats, it doesn't work like that.

We do know that on a population level DC who are breastfed are healthier with lower incidence of gastroenteritis and other things I forget. Of course gastroenteritis is rarely fatal in the UK as we have access to medical care. But it's still worth knowing.

Likewise, we know on a population level that women who breastfeed have lower chances of developing breast cancer plus other things I forget (again).

It isn't looking at topics like mental health or parenting workload or income differences - there are arguments that it should but that is not the argument being made here. We're talking purely in health terms.

Lass is right. The general issue with most people who promote BF is they found it easy or they are total zealots who cannot see another view.

Setting up BF as easy/natural/womanly/motherly etc is deeply, deeply wrong. Because you then exclude everyone who found it difficult or couldn’t (for whatever reason biological or social). BF support is this weirdly regressive echo chamber where normally quite progressive women seem to find it ok to dictate what another woman must do with her body despite the mental and physical impact it is having on her.

How is this any different than the pro-life lobby? I’ve seen quite a few pro-BF posters in here (tif mainly the pretty rabid ones) suggesting that maternal mental and physical health is less important that the (not at all conclusive) effects on the baby. How is that different than telling woman she has to give up her body to a pregnancy she doesn’t want or even to a sexual relationship she doesn’t want.

The message comes across as: ‘your child has more rights over your body than you do and if you don’t give way to our social pressure then you are not being motherly, are selfish and aren’t following proper female behaviour (whatever the fuck that is). Am I the only one who sees this?

@LassWiTheDelicateAir I do not actually believe that, I was being sarcastic, apologies. Far from it. Like you I had massive problems breast feeding - insurmountable I'm fact and am now ff my 12 week old, I find it very hard not to personalise these debates as I am still grieving and feeling like a failure.
I just see a fucking massive red mist when I see anything about bonding and breastfeeding and it really upsets me.

Ugh, an interesting thread hyjacked by the perpetually offended.

I found bf to be incredibly empowering and it is one of the few times when I truly trusted my body.

I have lots of opinions about why this a feminist issue but I want mention one particular thing that I experienced - the complete and utter lack of decent medical training about BF.

Midwives I met had weird old fashioned ideas about timed feeding etc, doctors didn't know the treat regime for ductile thrush or mastitis, public health nurses using old formula weight charts to judge bf babies gains........

Can anyone else think of a natural bodily function that men experience that it's acceptable for medical professionals to either know nothing about or be poorly informed?

the complete and utter lack of decent medical training about BF.
Yy. I know 2 people irl who were fobbed off with "blocked duct" when it was clearly mastitis and then got abscesses and had to have horrible and painful draining/packing.
Grim.
I've heard HCPs being really derogatory to a younger mother struggling to establish bf. To me it was clear there was an issue with the baby but they really were horrible ("you're a mother now, you can't ignore the baby!)

Fwiw I had the opposite experience of pressure to mixed feed for my mental health with my second child. Apparently it meant my husband could share the load . My own views and priorities (which were to establish breastfeeding) were pretty much discounted and I was made to feel like I was being difficult for persisting with feeding. So it works both ways

In most of the world, breast feeding infants is just normal. The English are very oddly hung up about it and I’ve never understood why.

The bottom line is that breast is best for baby. Nothing else really matters much.

I wonder if it depends what type of feminism you identify with. I know thanks to MN I’m a radfem, and I’m pretty sure bf fits into the radfem category (female bodily functions are not lesser than men etc, society needs reorganising to recognise the value of female reproductive labour).

Not sure how bf fits with libfem? I’d sense more of a clash?

Breastfeeding is no less feminist than pregnancy. And we don’t go around ‘blaming’ mothers who had premature babies do we - stopping breastfeeding is similar to my mind. I guess if artificial wombs are ever invented and commercialised then we’ll see a huge upswing in guilt/judgement around pregnancy.

Trouble with the bf vs ff ‘debate’ is that it plays right into the hands of the formula companies. Like that Similac ‘mummy wars’ ad that went viral - didn’t have similac branding or any formula branding on at all, yet won industry awards for its psychological impact and the increase in formula sales across all brands (Similac took one for the team).

The most effective way to kill friend-to-friend and family-to-family breastfeeding support is to introduce guilt and judgement into these situations. Also guilt and judgement reduces public feeding - bf and ff. Again, this is an insidious way to reduce support. And when you kill off bf support - you sell formula.

Batteries I disagree with your comparison with premature babys.

Raising awareness of the importance of a full term pregnancy and keeping the baby in as long as possible isn't going to decrease the number of premature babies.

However the lack of knowledge about breastfeeding particularly in deprived areas, both knowledge about how to bf and why you would try to bf (health benefits etc), is a big reason for the appalling bf rates.

Breast is best campaigns are certainly not the way to do it. An education system that actually values women and instills from early the positive health and social impacts of bf at the earliest stages.

Lass, I think you are taking this very personally. Breast feeding does have many proven benefits, both for baby and mother - individual circumstances obviously change the benefit analysis.

Personally, I never thought I'd do anything else - I remember my mum breastfeeding my younger sister (although thinking back, I do remember bottles in the house for my brother too), and just assumed that's what I would do. I had a tough time with my first - I remember DP sending me to bed about a week in, and wandering into the kitchen after a blissful 4 hour nap to find him standing there, bottle with premix milk (freebie - not the uk) in hand trying to decide whether to wake me up, or try to feed grizzling DS1 the bottle. I had those hard weeks - bleeding nipples, DS losing 9% body weight - I found my notebooks the other day cataloguing everything to 10 minute intervals - probably formula would have been a good plan, but I was so far in the fog it didn't occur to me until DS figured it out and we all calmed down, and were grateful that for the next few months I could just pick up and leave the house without worrying about bottles - given I have trouble keeping enough clean mugs for a cup of tea! (and contrary to people's experiences here, I've never had anyone pressure me to feed in any way - formula or breast, in the UK or Canada).

For everyone, there are pros and cons and it's up to you to decide. In this, feminism is about choice.

I do think it's a profoundly feminist act to feed a child from your own body, but it's also completely feminist to ensure your own health, by formula feeding if that is what you want to do.

Initiation rates for feeding are high.

I really don’t think mothers aren’t breastfeeding because they don’t know - in theory - that it’s a good idea.

On the whole the mothers I’ve known who have stopped have stopped through health reasons or social pressures they have little control over.

There needs to be a stop to this idea that if we educate the silly women they will breastfeed. It plays directly into the hands of the formula companies. Most women want to breastfeed. Lots of women/babies would just do it instinctively if the birthing process centered mothers. If they didn’t then encounter guilt and judgement they might well happily continue.

Breastfeeding is part of a much wider issue - women’s reproductive labour is not valued, women are routinely disrespected and devalued during pregnancy and birth, and that attitude only worsens once the baby is birthed and mother attempts breastfeeding.

We aren't allowed to talk about bf without the the perpetually offended spoil g the thread

In the six months my ds has only breast milk my dh cooked almost every hot meal I ate.
That’s equality. He fed me, I fed ds.
He never even considered expecting me to have his dinner ready when he got in from work.

Breast feeding does make the mother and father role different for a while but there are many ways to accommodate that. It’s a drop in the ocean compared to the whole parenting role for the whole of a child’s life.

I don't think we should dismiss the views of women who feel failed by current popular breastfeeding narratives or [lack of] support as being "professionally offended".

I also don't think we should silence talk about the benefits of breastfeeding.

I'm very happy to discuss how these (mostly health related) benefits interact with other loss/gain scenarios such as mental health, bonding with other family members, economic and financial, independence, bodily autonomy. I feel like that's what we should be discussing really.

Ive never really understood the bonding thing tbh. Surely babies bond with who they live with and the voices they hear every day.

My older kids do fuck all for the baby but he adores them. (To be fair they are only 6 and 3 )

As they get older they become more capable of bonding with people they don’t see every day. I’m just not all that convinced bonding is always task-based. I feel like it’s presence based. The more they see you, the more they care.

I am a massive supporter of BF and BF women - anyone who's seen me here over the years knows this. I disagree that praising women for BF is a ^good* thing - here's why:

• society needs to support, affirm, acknowledge and enable women to bf. Praising can be infantilising and patronising.

• the obverse of praising women for BF is to withhold praise from women, or even criticise, women, who use formula. Not cool.

So....support, practical help, knowledge sharing, affirmation, real understanding of the barriers women face YES. Praise? No.

My opinion only of course.

I read the politics of Bf when my youngest was a few months old. He was the fourth baby I BF and I didn't find it easy at all. He had/has a tongue tie and until it was snipped, feeding him was a nightmare.
I've often suggested people read the book, and I remember being flamed to the pits of hell for suggesting it on a thread in chat at the time because I was being a "breastfeeding nazi".
People should have a choice to feed their baby how they wish, but at the same time it seems weird to criticise scientific facts about BF, almost akin to TRAs decrying science to fit their ideology.
The fact is breasts produce milk to feed babies, milk that is tailored to their every need at every stage, and the feeding process is protective to the mother too. It's a shame that this offends some people, when they can still choose whichever method to feed their baby that suits them. In this country we have the benefit of making that choice, and as long as facts are freely available, no-one should be feeling bad about exercising their right to choose.

Imo birth/ labour is more of a direct comparison to bf than premature birth. Statistically a straightforward vb is healthiest and easiest for mother and baby. But when it doesn't work out that way we don't tell mothers who had a cs or other intervention that 'vb is best' and that if they just tried a bit harder they could have a straightforward vb. Because we accept that biology just doesn't work that way. And information on none textbook births is freely given, not dismissed as a parent not putting their baby's needs first.

It isn't my type of feminism to make another woman feel inferior or guilty based on her ability to lactate. Because imo it's irrelevant to anybody's worth as a mother.

TBH, that book was what changed me from being a "lactivist" (breastfeeding first) to what I feel is a more feminist position of mothers first.

It is not about glorifying breastfeeding at all costs, it is simply about protecting it from those with agendas which threaten it, which is sometimes for profit making reasons and sometimes for controlling women reasons.

Give the power back to women, but importantly, let them choose what to do with it!