Lift Up Your Hearts!

I should be happy that the New York Times is highlighting the importance of breastfeeding. But this article on the difficulties faced by nursing mothers in lower-income jobs is disturbing in ways the author did not intend.

Poor women, and their children, suffer because their employers are not as sympathetic to their need to pump milk for their babies as are the employers of professional women. Thus they are less likely to breastfeed their children, and when they do it is not for as long a time, in yet another case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

All too true. But the idealized portrait of the corporate "lactation room" supplied with pumps, telephones, Internet connections, CD players and reading material neglects a major component of the advantages of breastfeeding. Yes, the milk itself is perfectly designed for human beings and superior in countless ways to the best possible artificial formula. However, just as the formula-makers try to isolate and imitate what they consider to be the important components of human milk, the proponents of workplace lactation are focusing nearsightedly on one part of the breastfeeding relationship—the milk—and ignoring or minimizing the human factors. Nursing is a relationship, a two-person job, an intimate interaction between mother and child. Milk that is mechanically pumped, far away from the sight, sound, smell, and touch of the baby; refrigerated, stored, and dispensed in plastic bottles by someone who is not the baby's mother—this cannot come close to providing the benefits of an on-demand, skin-to-skin, eye-to-eye mother/child connection.

It may be the best that can be done in difficult circumstances, and it's certainly better than the same non-interaction using commercial formula. But it's time to stop pretending such substitutes are anything more than second best. One mother is quoted in the article as saying, of pumping milk for her son, "There is a lot of satisfaction in knowing I am doing right by him." She's doing better than she could be, and perhaps the best she can—that's not for me to judge. But she's not doing what's best for her son, and she shouldn't be beguiled into thinking she is.

Inexpensive prints of famous art works are a boon and a blessing, opening a world of beauty to many who could never see, let alone own, the originals. But no one pretends that a photo of the Mona Lisa is da Vinci's masterpiece, and someone who attempts to pass an imitation off as the real thing is normally considered a criminal.