Will Formula Feeding Harm My Baby?

Recommend (0) Comments (7)

Sponsored by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the recent National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign (NBAC) claimed that not breastfeeding was risky for babies.  “You’d never take risks before your baby is born. Why start after?” asked televised public service announcements over images of pregnant women logrolling and riding a mechanical bull.  The message was clear: only a woman callous enough to compete in extreme sports when pregnant would feed formula to her baby, and bottle-feeders are like pregnant women who ride bulls (and presumably drink alcohol) in bars: they knowingly and needlessly put their babies at risk. Some campaign advocates likened bottle-feeding to smoking and argued that the risks were essentially the same.

The rhetoric of the NBAC was hyperbolic, but it reflects a pervasive cultural view that mothers must assume the responsibility to protect their children from any conceivable risk.  In an era when the populace seems consumed with eliminating all kinds of risks, a cultural message has developed that mothers not only must protect their children from immediate threats but also must become experts in everything their children might encounter.  Mothers are held uniquely responsible for predicting and preventing any circumstance that might interfere with their children’s putatively normal development, and they are exhorted to optimize every dimension of children’s lives, beginning with the womb.  This moral code, a vision of “total motherhood,” is  frequently cast as a trade-off between what babies and children need versus what mothers might like.

Certainly, passion for breastfeeding and antipathy for infant formula are rooted in concern about babies.  But they also derive from an ethos which presumes that a moral mother will subjugate herself completely to a culturally defined, all-inclusive notion of the needs of children.  When mothers have wants, such as a sense of bodily, emotional, and psychological autonomy, but children have needs, such as an environment in which anything less than optimal is framed as perilous, then good mothering requires that mothers repress their own wants.  Each mother is responsible for adopting behavior that reduces even minuscule or poorly understood risks to her children, regardless of the cost to herself.  The NBAC fused widespread confusion about risk and this code of motherhood, with the result that maternal responsibility to protect babies from the dangers associated with bottle-feeding became something of a moral absolute.  So while observers are likely to recognize the obvious exaggerations in the campaign imagery, the underlying message — that good mothers must protect their children from any imaginable risk — seems culturally reasonable.