Lacto-Life

It's been some years since I was part of this game, but lately I've run across two articles about breastfeeding and its peculiar orthodoxy which I found interesting. First, Hannah Rosin at The Atlantic makes A Case Against Breastfeeding: does breastfeeding really, asks Rosin, make you a better, smarter, healthier mother? Oh, well, supposedly that's not the point . . .

(ETA: As Pentimento rightly points out, Rosin's article really tips towards a complaint about parenting as non-egalitarian, which of course it is, or should be, since "egalitarian parenting" seems to turn into egalitarian non-parenting: "egalitarian" means both parents get to leave the baby and go to work. But I am interested in her unpacking of the question of whether breast really is best, or at least whether it's THAT much better than the alternative.)

And at Inside Catholic, Kate Wicker writes about lactivism and choice.

via Pentimento

For the record, I don't have a dog in any fight about breastfeeding any more, and even when I did, I spent time on both sides of the issue. Our first child nursed until she was two and a half, at which point we had a summit meeting on the topic: My Body Is Not Your Body; No, Not Any More. Our second child weaned himself shortly after his first birthday. Confronted with a choice between eating and walking, he chose both, opting for forms of nourishment which he could carry with him as he climbed into drawers and sat in the dishwasher.

Our third child was born in the U.K., was taken back to the U.S. for baptism, and was reinstated as a resident of Great Britain with his biological clock on American time. I tried putting him in bed with me to nurse to sleep, and discovered that while he would happily nurse all night long, sleep was a pursuit which interested him not the slightest. After about six weeks of all-day, all-night, perpetually wakeful baby, not to mention two older children who had to be walked to school at, like, a TIME every morning, in desperation I went out and bought the British anti-attachment-parenting Bible: The Contented Little Baby Book, by Gina Ford.

Following her directions, I instituted a feeding schedule and gave the baby a bottle last thing in the evening, so that if he cried at night, I could be reasonably sure that it wasn't from hunger. I should confess, too, that the bottle came as a relief to me, because this child liked to bite. I don't just mean that he bit me: he LIKED to bite, and to watch me react. The others had tried this on a little, but I'd been able to train them out of it. Not this child -- bless his heart. In the course of getting him to sleep, we also toughed out a couple of crying nights with him, which seemed eternal at the time, but really were not. He slept in our room, so whatever he suffered, we suffered right along with him. The upshot of it all was that he did very quickly learn to lie down and go to sleep, and he's a champion sleeper to this day; the other upshot of it was that he weaned himself from breast to bottle at seven months, and we promptly conceived Baby 4.

Baby 4 spent the first week of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit with Group B Strep and came home taking a bottle and on a feeding schedule. We nursed with mutual halfheartedness for about six months, and that was it. That was an insane time in our lives: in the course of a year and a half we'd had one baby, finished one doctoral dissertation, found no job, made one transatlantic move, started homeschooling two older children, and had one more baby. I was happy that this baby hadn't died from Group B Strep, and that she was very quickly willing to sleep through the night, and I was also happy for her father or her older sister or brother to feed her if they wanted to. I could let go my stranglehold, I found, and it was a relief.

I will say this: the child who nursed the longest had far and away the most ear infections of the four. The child who nursed the least has, after the first week of her life, hardly ever been sick. The children who nursed for shorter times don't seem any less well-adjusted, or intelligent, or confident than those who nursed longer-term -- in fact, once again, it's the two bottle-babies who work a crowd as though they were running for public office. Public office on Neptune, maybe, but still.

At any rate, I loved nursing my babies while it lasted, and I'm grateful to have had that closeness with them when they were tiny. I've always encouraged friends at least to try breastfeeding their babies -- it's the kind of thing you can stop doing if it doesn't work out, but it's a heck of a lot harder to change your mind the other way. In short, I'm all for it, at least in theory, but I am interested to see some intelligent dissent among the maternal ranks. And while I'd concur that breast is good, on the whole I believe with Kate Wickers that life is best.