Battleground: Breasts

Hooray for Kathryn Blundell, the much-maligned editor of the UK's Mother and Baby Magazine, who defended her decision NOT to breastfeed. Here's the BBC article summarizing her comments. She calls breastfeeding "creepy," even.

To be clear, I do not agree with her perspective. But isn't she expressing what many women (and I daresay most men) in our culture think about breastfeeding? Because breasts are so sexualized for us, it's hard to uncouple those sexual connotations. That's a cultural disconnect to address.

For me, breastfeeding is a very charged issue. When pregnant, I had every intention of nursing. But then my daughter spent her first several days hooked to monitors in the NICU, and I couldn't nurse her. I had to pump. If you've never been hooked up to a breast pump, the sensation is distinctly bovine. I hated to pump. A sense of foreboding and dread descend on me every time I started to pump (thanks, hormones!). It was tough psyching myself up to do that every few hours. Meanwhile, my daughter became accustomed to the bottles used in NICU. When I finally could attempt to get her to latch on, she screamed in terror at my approaching breasts. My milk came... and then went.

Currently, there's a pervasive bias toward breastfeeding in the medical community and among upper-middle class moms, the type who might also worry about buying organic this and weigh carefully all the diapering options and mull baby signing classes. When I was a baby in the 70s, nursing was seen as an inferior choice made only by women who couldn't afford formula or weird hippie types. Now, the reverse is true. Women who want to do the right thing by their infants are expected to breastfeed because of a plethora of health benefits conferred by breastmilk.

So birth classes and hospitals hype breastfeeding--while also contradictorily providing plenty of formula samples and coupons in welcome packs. But when it came to nursing under my daughter's and my particular circumstances, I didn't get much help or support from nursing staff. I had no women among my family and friends who could help because they either didn't have kids or felt profound discomfort about nursing. The lactation "help" offered in the hospital was perfunctory and distinctly unhelpful. When the consultant squeezed my painfully engorged breast without warning, I can't say it inspired me to seek further "assistance."

When I couldn't nurse successfully, I felt like a failure as a woman and a mom. The prevailing wisdom indicates that I just wasn't trying hard enough, that I was taking the "lazy" route by formula feeding. In the blur of the first post-partum weeks, the last thing I needed was some other pressure telling me I was doing a bad job. Unfortunately, pro-nursing sentiment is pretty strident and uncompromising. I had internalized their party line. Anytime the subject of breastfeeding came up for a few years after, I would become emotional and tear up, still haunted by the feeling that I'd done my daughter a horrible disservice by feeding her formula.

Unfortunately, even for those women who do the "right" thing and nurse, the approbation they receive extends only to the hospital doors. In the wider world outside, women are routinely ogled or reviled for nursing, even discreetly, in public. No one would object to bottle feeding a baby in public, but nursing women are routinely banished to the bathroom. People often express outright revulsion at nursing. I find that inability to accept breasts' multiple purposes offensive. But I also understand how women can internalize those competing pressures. In some women, as Blundell articulates, the sexual function of breasts will prevail.

I hate that we view these functions as dichotomous, that we can't see breasts as sexual and decorative under certain circumstances and baby-nourishing under others. Why must they be mutually exclusive? Why isn't nursing considered sexy, or sex seen as an integral part of being a mom? Why is breastfeeding a litmus test for good mothering?

Breasts are a battleground, an emblem of the many conflicting roles and duties our culture inflicts on us. But they're also a very personal space. I don't agree with Blundell's assessment of breastfeeding, nor do I agree with rabid nursing advocates who can't or won't understand the many reasons women may not breastfeed. Do I wish my experience with nursing had been more successful? Of course. But am I a terrible mother because I didn't? Not at all. Neither is Blundell for saying publicly what so many people already think and feel.