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I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.
La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty some have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.
La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."
So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:
Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:
Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."
How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here? Are they doing big group lactation sessions and don't want men to see their breasts? Is it a budgetary issue? The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.
Notably, there is no reason for including men. While men can be given drugs to cause lactation they cannot be mothers, even if they wear a dress and grow their hair out and insist on going by ‘she’. It is impossible for a man to give birth.
You can make an argument regarding "mother is unable to breastfeed because dead/mastectomy following breast cancer; father can't arrange a wet-nurse and thus tries to do it himself". It's a shaky argument, but it's an argument.
The consensus IIRC is that:
The reasons nobody's done it are:
Mostly, modern formula is basically fine, the effects are there, but small, and almost no fathers are willing to go to the lengths necessary to try producing milk rather than relying on donor milk and formula.
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