SMALL D SES
Essay
Pressing the Flesh How medicine’s aggressive push toward breastfeeding is harming families BY STEVE FRIESS
AT FIRST, IT STRUCK ME AS FUNNY. Our doctor’s office always
provides some age-appropriate parenting health information along with the after-visit report for our kids’ appointments, and my daughter’s 2-month-old checkup was no exception. This time, though, mingled among the most rudimentary, uncontroversial advice — Talk to your baby! Use a car seat! Don’t smoke! — was a section about the paramount importance of breastfeeding. As with most heteronormative things that come my way as a gay dad, I smirked and tried to shrug it off. Except I couldn’t. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how inappropriate it is for my provider, Michigan Medicine, to be including this admonition as a general rule for 26 /
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everyone — and that it is a symptom of a trend in neonatal pediatrics that has gone way too far. Here’s a shocker: Breastfeeding isn’t for everyone. It is not a universal truth that breastfeeding is always the best option or an irrefutably correct opinion — like, say, that you shouldn’t let a baby’s room get too warm — that it is better. And yet, since the advent of baby formula, there has never been a time when the pressure to breastfeed was more intense. It starts within the hour of a birth and doesn’t let up for months thereafter. A nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago encouraged my daughter’s birth mother to nurse the newborn because — move over blueberries, goji berries, and chia seeds — the first squirts of breast milk, known as colostrum, are the super-est of superfoods. If you buy the hype, and enough people do that there’s actually a market for goat milk colostrum, this stuff has Lewis Carroll-level magical qualities. Never mind that everyone at Rush maternity knew this child was being adopted; the idea of encouraging a woman who is placing her baby with another family to begin and then have to cease lactation is ridiculous — and cruel. This push causes real damage to mothers and to families. My niece, Arielle Zellis-Paley, had a baby boy in 2019, two weeks after the birth of my son. About a year later, she opened up in great detail for The Layers Project Magazine, an online journal for Jewish women, about how her struggle to nurse exacerbated postpartum depression the rest of the family didn’t even know she was dealing with. Arielle wrote, “I had a low supply of breast milk, and I was trying around the clock to nurse, pump, nurse, and pump. The pressure was on. YOU NEED TO GIVE YOUR BABY YOUR LIQUID GOLD. The nurses had yelled at me day one postpartum, and they grabbed my breast and shoved it into Nafshi’s mouth. I was sobbing. It really hurt and I felt like a failure already.” Yes, researchers have identified some health benefits of breast milk for babies — lower incidence of allergies and asthma, antibodies that can fight viruses and bacteria, less constipation — and those upsides deserve to be considered. But the data on this lacks context; the vast
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