Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood

Notes

153 1. Jules Law, “The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 2 (2000): 407. 2. Bernice L. Hausman, Mother ’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), 223. 3. Katherine A. Dettwyler, “Formula Is Bad for Babies,” Chicago Parent, January 2004. 4. Maloney proposed the breastfeeding promotion act in 2001 and has reintroduced the bill in every succeeding House session. Jeff Merkley of Oregon became the first Senate sponsor of the bill in 2009, when it was presented in both chambers. 5. Among the organizations and institutions officially recommending breastfeeding are the American Academy of Family Physicians, “AAFP Policy Statement on Breastfeeding ,” 2001; the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “Breastfeeding: Maternal and Infant Aspects,” 2001; the American Dietetic Association, “Position of the American Dietetic Association : Promoting and Supporting Breastfeeding,” 2009; the American Association of Health Plans, “Advancing Women’s Health: Health Plans’ Innovative Programs in Breastfeeding Promotion,” 2001; the American Public Health Association (www.apha.org/ advocacy/policy/policysearch/ default.htm?id=1360); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/ breastfeeding/); and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (www.4woman. gov/breastfeeding/). 6. AAP, Section on Breastfeeding , “Policy Statement: Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk,” Pediatrics 115, no. 2 (2005): 496. 7. Jodi R. Godfrey and David Meyers, “Toward Optimal Health: Maternal Benefits of Breastfeeding,” Journal of Women ’s Health 18, no. 9 (2009): 2. 8. The one clear exception is gastrointestinal infections, which I address in chapter 2. 9. Because breastfeeding promotion has been primarily a discourse about babies, my analysis of the science focuses exclusively on breastfeeding’s health effects on babies. 10. AAP, “Policy Statement: Breastfeeding,” 499; www.llli. org/FAQ/frequency.html (accessed August 4, 2009). 11. I did discover pioneering works by Pam Carter and Linda Blum, which were followed by thoughtful analyses from Jules Law, Glenda Wall, Bernice Hausman, and others, scholarship that I address in chapter 1. But I remained struck by the absence of a sustained feminist conversation about breastfeeding comparable to ongoing feminist debates about such matters as pregnancy and childbirth. 12. Some of my analysis, particularly the discussion of breastfeeding research, poses important questions about feeding in any context. But to unpack the international dimension of breastfeeding, particularly the politics of breastfeeding in the developing world, is well beyond the scope of this book. While other scholars have taken up this issue, I concentrate on the United States. 13. Gloria Steinem, “If Men Could Menstruate,” Ms., October 1978. 14. Male lactation in mammals has been observed in two species of bats, flying foxes and Dayak fruit bats, and increased levels of the hormone prolactin can cause spontaneous lactation in human males. However, extensive research on male lactation or breastfeeding has not been conducted. See Thomas H. Kunz and David J. Hosken, Notes Preface 154 Notes to the Preface “Male Lactation: Why, Why Not and Is It Care?” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24, no. 2 (2009): 80–85; Nikhil Swaminathan , “Strange but True: Males Can Lactate,” Scientific American, September 6, 2007; and Charles M. Francis et al., “Lactation in Male Fruit Bats,” Nature 367 (1994): 1691–92. 15. Linda M. Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (Boston: Free Press, 2004). 16. Douglas and Michaels, The Mommy Myth, 6. 17. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, “Risk Anxiety and the Social Construction of Childhood ,” in Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions and Perspective, ed. Deborah Lupton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 89. 18. On the need to situate gender in other contexts, see Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): esp. 1065–70; and Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing EqualityVersus -Difference: Or, the Use of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 33–50. On race, see William Julius Wilson, The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Chapter 1 1. Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–50. 2. Ibid., 53. 3. C. Becket Mahnke, “The Growth and Development...