Initiatives like the Big Latch On and The Milk Truck strike me as positive examples of breastfeeding advocacy. Their goal is to protect women’s ability to choose how and where to feed their children. But as I’ve discovered again and again while writing this book, breastfeeding advocacy too often crosses the line into lactivism, including compulsory breastfeeding, breastfeeding as a moral crusade, and breastfeeding as a means of distinguishing good from bad parents. When it does, it limits rather than protects women’s choices. Some lactivists have in fact described “choice” as the language of the enemy. Here you will be provided with the best sex doctor in Delhi, http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/gotaway_ES.pdf buy tadalafil without prescription we are going to discuss some mystical secrets you haven’t discovered about phallus. The hips represent the major male/female axis in the body irrespective of gender. levitra samples It has been a part purchase generic viagra learningworksca.org of human life ever since Adam first set his eyes on Eve. Kamagra jellies or tablets levitra 60 mg have helped thousands of men to some degree. Their campaigns are specifically designed to undermine the idea that women can take into account their own individual circumstances—jobs, child-care options, and so on—when choosing how to feed their babies. At their most extreme, lactivists view breastfeeding as an end in itself—an activity to be defended at all costs, even when it threatens the health and well-being of babies and mothers.
Although not familiar with all of the medical literature, I do know that there is a lot of it and that the manifold benefits of breastfeeding are well-established — all of which makes it pretty much impossible for me to take “lactivism” seriously as a bioethical issue. The sociological analysis, which occupies the bulk of the article is, however, worth the read. (Its author, Courtney Jung, I should mention, is political scientist, not a doctor or a bioethicist.)
Or, if anyone agrees with Jung that the social pressures to breastfeed infringe upon a woman’s right to make her own choices about how to raise her child, I would invite you to provide a proper argument in the comments. Find the article at Salon.com.
This is a serious bioethical issue (maybe I misread you when you suggest you find it hard to take it as such). Medicine and public health have a long history of moralistically shaming women into a felt need to be the perfect vessel for healthy babies/children/future citizens. Women who struggle with breastfeeding for whatever reason suffer from the normative ideal. Everything is potentially distorted when put through the lens of ‘choice’–but this is an important example where the idea of choice doesn’t seem to be used in a consumerist sense; rather, it’s about respecting women’s individual strategies for dealing with less than perfect biologies and less than perfect worlds.
I think the point that putting things through the lens of “choice” can be distorting. This is true, AND, as you note, the normative ideal of breastfeeding does make it very difficult for women to feel good about other options if they want to breastfeed and struggle to do so, for various reasons.
I think there are more helpful ways to frame this issue than the “choice” lens, and I will be thinking more about that! Thanks Lynette!
Thanks, Lynette. I suspect the issue is poor excerpting. The quotation I put up on the blog seemed to come from nowhere in the article. The book, presumably, describes legitimately coercive practices that actually do “shame” women whom, for legitimate reasons, do not breastfeed. As it stands, the Salon tagline alludes (without providing actual citation) to “reports [that] suggest breast-feeding’s benefits can be overstated” and, in this way, framed the whole thing too much as if the basic public health message needed to be reconsidered, which I’m pretty sure is wrong.
There have been a number of quite good bioethically oriented works on this issue, notably one by bioethicist and feminist philosopher Rebecca Kukla which is a thoughtful analysis of how these public health campaigns elide all the many constraints upon women that shape their “failure” to breastfeed. I commend it to all: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v021/21.1kukla02.html.
Another, by Barnhill and Morain, just came out in the fall issue of IJFAB: https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/international_journal_of_feminist_approaches_to_bioethics/v008/8.2.barnhill.html
I am far from an expert on the scientific literature on the benefits of breastfeeding, but I thought the main point of those who argue that the benefits of breastfeeding have been overstated is that many of the studies we have which purport to show that breastfeeding is by far superior to formula feeding do not properly account for variables such as socio-economic status, education level, etc. of the parents. And haven’t recent “sibling studies” which have tried to rectify that difficulty to some extent found little difference between formula fed and breastfed siblings (at least for the health outcomes examined)? At least, the press release at Ohio State about one such study uses the same exact language as the Salon article: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sibbreast.htm (which is not to say, of course, that such language is accurate). I’ve seen a significant amount of criticism from researchers of different stripes who in evaluating the studies point to the weakness of the case in favor of breastfeeding making a large difference (which is not to say it makes no difference at all). But if the difference is small (off the top of my head, for instance, I remember an estimate of preventing one diarrhea type illness in a year and a few IQ points), then indeed I would think that would undercut the public health message very much, given that women’s bodily autonomy is at stake, wouldn’t it?