Doraine Bailey  --  Lexington, KY

I believe in breastfeeding.

In the twenty-plus years that I’ve worked with breastfeeding mothers, with the health care system, with lawmakers, and with communities, I’m constantly amazed at the depth and breadth of human experience encompassed in this simple yet complex relationship between mother and child. Breastfeeding impacts and is impacted by gross and subtle aspects of human health and development, economics, politics, culture, the physicial environment, and personal comfort with the body.

I remember that as a child, I knew I had been breastfed and that breastfed kids were smarter. Just that piece of knowledge was motivating – I had been given the gift of being smarter and needed to be sure I used it. In my 20’s when I came to work with breastfeeding professionally, I was not a mother nor had breastfed a baby.  As an anthropologist, I spoke with mothers about their experiences, about what drew them toward breastfeeding or what pushed them away. I began to understand the complexity of something I had always taken for granted.

When a mother breastfeeds, she provides food, comfort, and shelter for her baby. She is temporarily pulled out of her own routine or expectations and moved into the most basic needs of human beings. Breastfeeding uses all bodily senses and many predisposing hormones to plunge a mother into head-over-heels love with this new human being. She is drawn in to pay attention to this new love, to love this new responsibility. Breastfeeding synergistically builds attachment between mother and child that persists long past weaning.  Perhaps that’s why it’s also called nursing, because it is being emotionally and physically available to care for another on the most basic, and many times messiest, level.

Breastfeeding is also a crash course introduction to mothering. It is a learned skill, which can be hard when there’s no one to teach it to a mother. It demands perseverance and patience to clue in to the baby’s signals and to teach the baby good technique. It can be a life-and-death test of a new mother’s competence. No wonder new mothers may ‘try’ breastfeeding but quickly turn to artificial baby milks for the perceived security they offer, especially when marketed for their convenience and their composition that is ‘just like breastmilk.’

Everyone has a breastfeeding story. At parties when I mention what I do as an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant, women and men will tell me their experiences as parents or grandparents, as bystanders, as breastfed children. Some are still grieving or angry that their experience did not meet their expectations, that the medical profession had let them down.  Others apologize that they ‘only breastfed’ for a few short days or weeks. Some tell the heroic stories of their wives and partners who breastfed or pumped in the face of health difficulties, public disparagement, and worksite harassment. A few express their disgust with the entire idea of breastfeeding and the rudeness or crudeness they see modeled by breastfeeding mothers and babies.

Over the years, I’ve seen breastfeeding become more common in the US and in Kentucky, where I live. I see how breastfeeding can now be the butt of jokes or plot lines in television shows. I see a growing mountain of evidence that breastfeeding and breastmilk have undoubted impact for normal human health.  Yet I’m disheartened.  I’m astonished at the pediatrician who counsels a motivated mother to start formula rather than referring her for help. I’m shocked at the business that forces employees to pump milk in their parked cars. I’m saddened at the childcare provider who won’t allow the mother to breastfeed her child on-site but will allow her to feed with a bottle. I’m angry at the restaurant who forces the paying customer to leave without eating rather than soothe the hungry baby by breastfeeding. I’m upset with the husband who does not want the baby to be breastfed because his wife’s breasts “belong to him.” I’m mortified at the congregation that views breastfeeding as sexually deviant rather than the moral behavior promoted in the Old Testament.

I understand that some mothers aren’t ready for breastfeeding, just as some women aren’t ready to be mothers. Sometimes they’re not ready for the innocent intimacy and the loving responsibility that both require. Many times they fear the backlash from family, partner, friends, or community who cannot move past the idea of breasts as purely sexual objects. Often they’re convinced that they cannot be good mothers, that they cannot make ‘good enough milk’, that having a strong relationship will ‘spoil’ the baby, and that they won’t be able to breastfeed.  How sad and terrifying that we as a society cannot truthfully and deeply acknowledge the unqualified importance of breastfeeding for empowering mothers to grow into their role as the advocate for their child.

I was already a believer in breastfeeding before I breastfed my own child, now many years ago.  Perhaps this belief made my own experience easy and normal – there was no trauma, no heartache, no obstacles to overcome.  Perhaps that’s why I value the normalcy of breastfeeding, the ‘ordinary magic’ of breastfeeding, and wish for every woman to be supported to embrace this subtle, deep and powerful introduction to motherhood.