Hanna Rosin's work measuring American political and religious winds has interested me for years. Now she has written an article for the Atlantic wherein she all but says breastfeeding makes women insane, twice.
Of course she is smart and a good researcher so she makes an excellent argument for giving in to the pressures against breastfeeding. Trouble is she calls women who nurse their children crazy--well actually one time it is the La Leche League lady who says her group is a little crazy. In any case it makes me a little angry.
What surprised me is Rosin seems disinterested in reducing crazy-making barriers to breastfeeding--labor policies that make staying at home or pumping so challenging, family law with no "tender years" provisions in contested divorces--or calling out the bitchy, superior uber-lacto mammas for their ridiculous judgments, as opposed to the nursing itself.
Could we please get to the point where a nursing mother attracts less consternation than the average midriff baring, tramp-stamped teen, before we call an end to the campaign to make breastfeeding acceptable across U.S. social classes and settings.
Funny thing is when you get to the end of her article, Rosin, a nursing mom, acknowledges that nursing contact with a baby is unique and she will "probably miss it" when her baby is weaned.
2 comments:
OK, admittedly, I didn't get past the first page of the article, but what bugged me most is that she made a three-page article about the PROBLEM of middle-class women being pressured to breastfeed by their toothed and clawed peers "...feeling trapped, like many women before me, in the middle-class mother’s prison of vague discontent: surly but too privileged for pity..." Seriously? But lets not talk about the woeful lack of prenatal care, safe and quality childcare options, the US's apallingly high infant and maternal mortality rates or the women for whom breastfeeding is not even a choice (not because of the other bitchy playground moms, but because she has to go back to work at a factory or 7-11 weeks after her baby is born). Oh no, we wouldn't want to sully the pages of the Atlantic with such PEDESTRIAN concerns. Gag!
Pure and simple, Andrea. I love you.
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