I’m a kind of poster child for bottle-feeding instead of breastfeeding. I’m a first-born, and my mother, bless her heart, decided to nurse me from her own nipples instead of the more “scientific” formula that was the middle-class aspirational standard of the 1940s. (Breastfeeding was strictly for hillbillies back then.) Six weeks later, I was nearly dead. My mother simply didn’t have the milk. A pediatrician took one look at my shriveled self and told her to stop. She made far briefer and just as ineffectual stabs at breastfeeding with my two younger sisters; but my two brothers, born somewhat later, were bottle babies from the word go.
It never occurred to most of the moms of the postwar Bottle Baby Boom era to imagine that there could be anything wrong with this picture. The babies, more or less exclusively fed on formula and jars of decidedly unorganic Gerber’s, thrived. The year 1963, representing the cohort of 18-year-olds born in 1945, marked the highest average SAT scores ever recorded in America.
All of that is now turned upside down, as Courtney Jung, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, documents in her highly readable Lactivism. Now, it’s breastfeeding that’s upper-middle-class aspirational, with working-class women, especially African Americans, preferring bottles. And while I don’t have children myself, several childbearing friends have complained to me about the dreaded postpartum visit from the “lactation consultant”—i.e., breastfeeding Nazi—who lectured them sternly about the supposedly poisonous qualities of infant formula, insisted they must be doing something wrong else the baby would “latch on” properly, and pooh-poohed any complaints about excruciating pain or inadequate milk supply.
“Breast is best,” the lactivist mantra, is a proposition with which I concur wholeheartedly. It’s a loving and also cheap way to provide complete nutrition to a newborn—if you can pull it off easily. But as Jung points out, “Breastfeeding is no longer just a way to feed a baby; it is a moral marker that distinguishes us from them—good parents from bad.” It’s also a status marker that separates highly educated middle- and upper-middle-class mothers from their less well-off sisters (many of them husbandless) who might not have the job flexibility to nurse, or nurse for very long.
“Breastfeeding is part of a package of lifestyle choices that will often include yoga, farmers’ markets, fair-trade coffee, cloth diapers, and homemade baby food,” Jung writes.
The tide that ultimately made breast milk both chic and quasi-compulsory began to turn during the late 1950s. The La Leche League, the oldest and most obnoxious (from what I’m told) of the lactivist organizations, got started in 1956 as a group of Roman Catholic women who named their movement after a venerated image of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus. (Nowadays, La Leche is firmly nonsectarian.) A few years later, hippies picked up on the “natural” aspects of nursing, as did radical Second Wave feminists. The earliest, mimeographed version of the rad-fem health manifesto Women and Their Bodies, circulated in 1971, aligned formula feeding with capitalism and an over-controlling medical profession.
Commercially manufactured formula was pretty much the norm by then, and there were scandals involving the aggressive marketing of the stuff to desperately poor Third World mothers, who sometimes inadvertently killed their babies by diluting the expensive formula with contaminated water. In any event, militant and lengthy breastfeeding became paradoxically associated (as it is today) with the most outré of hipsters and also with “crunchy” strains of religiously conservative Christians. Besides nursing their young ones for months on end, both groups go in for home-birthing, “attachment parenting” in which mothers “wear” their infants in ersatz peasant slings, and “co-sleeping,” which means that Mom and Dad share their bed with tiny Junior and, perhaps, his older siblings as well.
Eventually, Jung reports, physicians got involved in the breastfeeding movement. Previously, the touted benefits of nursing had been largely confined to strengthening the mother-child bond. But as soon as such organizations as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Centers for Disease Control began endorsing breastfeeding, mother’s milk turned into an all-purpose infant-health elixir with magical properties.
The scientific studies that supposedly support these enthusiastic conclusions actually show more ambiguous outcomes. For example, there does seem to be a correlation between nursing and higher childhood cognitive development. But that may be because upscale mothers who breastfeed their babies also spend a lot of time playing Mozart for them in the womb—or simply transmit to them their own high-I Q genes.
In 2012, the AAP issued a statement identifying breastfeeding as a “public health issue” akin to avoiding second-hand smoke and wearing seatbelts. A 2011 report from the Obama administration’s surgeon general’s office highlighted a study that claimed breastfeeding would save American taxpayers $3.6 billion annually in formula outlays, days taken off work by parents caring for their formula-sickened children, and the cost to society in lost productivity occasioned by premature deaths supposedly attributable to formula-feeding.
In 2009, the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides vouchers to low-income women for buying nutritious foods, began offering a superior quantity and range of groceries to mothers who breastfeed exclusively. In 2012, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg—he of the 16-ounce drink-cup ban—launched Latch On NYC. This “nudge” (to nursing) program required hospitals to keep formula under lock and key, dole it out in minute quantities, and hector new moms incessantly on the pneumonia, diarrhea, and ear infections that would ensue from feeding a baby out of a bottle. In the Third World, the World Health Organization and other groups have downplayed the high risk of HIV transmission by way of mother’s milk in order to promote the breast.
The irony, as Jung points out, is that, thanks to all the mother’s-milk-is-healthiest rhetoric, the bottle has actually made a covert comeback, because few career-pressed women have the time or inclination for the one or even two solid years of nursing that the lactivists tout. There is now a lively capitalist market in breast pumps (including some very fancy models), storage bags, cleaning equipment, and Internet-facilitated “human milk sharing” that has turned the product of women’s breasts into a valuable commodity.
Courtney Jung, who admits to a crunchy, attachment-parenting side to raising her own children, can occasionally sound like a lactivist herself. She is more tolerant than I of “nurse-ins,” those exhibitionist displays in which militant mothers gather in public places, strip to the waist, and give suck—all to prove some point about the naturalness of what they’re doing. Like many a progressive, she thinks that universal paid maternity leave will solve all the problems she raises. Still, she makes a strong argument: If women are supposed to have a “choice” about their reproductive activities, why can’t they choose how to nourish the offspring that
might emerge?
Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
