Breastfeeding, Socio-Economic Class, and Capitalism

Corporate Voices for Working Families, Abbott Nutrition, and Working Mother Media have posted a press release at BenefitsLink.com on a new toolkit for employers to support breastfeeding for working women. The toolkit is specifically designed to address the obstacles faced by hourly and lower-wage employees. It is designed to help front-line managers implement lactation programs and educate hourly and lower-wage employees on the benefits of breastfeeding and how they can balance that with working.

Hat tip: Debra Davis.

This is certainly a great development in a lot of ways if it can help empower lower wage workers to make the choices that work best for them, when often these women don't have many real choices. And it seems that the sponsors really intend to empower these women and to promote maternal and infant health. So why am I not vehemently shouting this program's praises? It's all because I listened to an NPR interview a couple of weeks ago with Jill Lepore, who was writing an article for the New Yorker about the current politics surrounding lactation and work.

Lepore mentioned the usual politics--the historical swings in the prevalence of breastfeeding in this country, the reasons for cultural shifts, and the class-bound nature of the issue. But she also talked about the current politics of the lactation movement. The movement has focused on the milk, rather than the mother and child, medicalizing the process, which allows for greater control of women (if we end up prosecuting women for drinking and then nursing, for example), and greater opportunities for profit by companies that make accessories to help with expressing, storing, and feeding the milk to infants.

And it may be women that lose out the most. The infants get cuddled and fed, while the women lose the opportunity to bond (at least during the time they're expressing milk), may just get more stress (at expressing milk in quasi-public places, for example, but even using a breast pump at all), and may not get the same hormonal benefits as they would (the stress might interfere with the oxytocin production that goes along with breastfeeding) if they were feeding the child from the breast. There also can be pain involved, and using a breast pump can be less efficient than nursing, so that the milk supply may decrease prematurely. If breast milk isn't substantially more nutritious than formula after it's been expressed and stored for a period of time, either refrigerated or frozen, the increased stress and decreased contact with the baby might not be worth it.

Now let me say first that profit does not appear to motivate any of the entities involved in producing this toolkit. None of them, it seems, profits from expression, storage, or feeding of breastmilk. But Lepore's article does make one think. Why isn't the movement pushing for longer paid maternity leave, for example, or onsite childcare to nurse in person? Perhaps those things are harder to sell to employers as benefitting them, perhaps they're a lot more expensive, and perhaps they run the risk of disempowering women in their choices about work. Or maybe we (I) just assume that.

MM