‘Keeping Women Down’ With Breastfeeding
Posted by Danielle Bean in Family on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 2:28 PM
Well, well, well.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before I read a feminist, anti-breastfeeding article like Hannah Rosin’s The Case Against Breastfeeding in this month’s Atlantic (HT: Crunchy Con).
Rosin is unconvinced by medical evidence that breastfeeding is a superior form of nutrition for human babies. And she may have a point there. Some of the studies comparing breastfeeding to formula feeding that she cites do indeed seem inconclusive.
“The medical literature looks nothing like the popular literature,” she writes. “It shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls.”
While that point might be be debatable, the real motivation behind Rosin’s argument becomes clear when she describes the enslavement she believes she suffered when she breastfed her children while her husband continued to work.
Being stuck at home breast-feeding as he walked out the door for work just made me unreasonably furious, at him and everyone else.
and
When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book — a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up — the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.
I think that Rosin and other women like her will never be satisfied. And that’s because while they say that they want liberation for women, the way they define that “liberation” is in direct conflict with the nature of women and motherhood.
Not that nature intends that no woman should ever earn a paycheck. Not that nature intends that no father should ever be the one to tend to a screaming baby 4:00 in the morning.
But motherhood is a very large part of the nature of most women. Even those women who never get married or have children of their own will often find a way to express their maternal side by caring for and connecting with other human beings in a way that just does not come as naturally to men.
I think that denying the innate differences between the sexes is a form of enslavement all its own.
In the end, Rosin’s argument isn’t about breast milk vs formula; it’s about how women define themselves and attach meaning to their work. Any woman who defines her life’s meaning in a way that is contrary to her very nature will never be satisfied—something that becomes clear when Rosin speaks of “meaningful work.”
Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way.
I’m not sure how any mother, breastfeeding or not, can read those words without feeling just a little bit sorry for the woman who wrote them.
Any mother who fails to recognize the “meaningful work” of nurturing another human being surely is sentencing herself to a lifetime of resentment and unhappiness.
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