Rebecca Kukla: recommendation

Transcript context

…The women who don’t breastfeed — why don’t they? And how rational a decision is that? Well, it depends where they are and who they are, to a large extent. There’s a huge worldwide emphasis on trying to get women to, as they put it, exclusively breastfeed, as in no bottles, nothing other than breast milk. Sometimes the advice is a year. Sometimes the advice is two years. If you live in a developed country with decent medical care and a clean water supply, there’s not really any interesting evidence that breastfeeding benefits your baby, certainly not after the first few weeks, but maybe not even after the first few days. There is pretty good evidence that those first few days of colostrum have a good immune effect, even on babies who are in otherwise privileged situations. I think that women who manage to get a few days of breast milk into their baby — if they live in a developed country — have done everything from the point of view of helping their baby that they need to do. And after that, it should just be a matter of whatever works for their lifestyle. Of course, on the other hand, if you’re in a developing country with a poor water supply, and formula that you make based on the water is going to be dangerous, and formula is expensive, and so forth, then compromising your ability to breastfeed by bottle supplementation may, in fact, be a really bad choice because if you stop being able to breastfeed, you’re going to be stuck doing this much more expensive, riskier thing that you might not be in a financial or physical position to do safely. So there are good reasons to encourage breastfeeding and to fight back against the marketing of formula in precarious, developing world countries, but really no reason here. As to why women here don’t breastfeed — when they don’t, it heavily tracks race. It heavily tracks class. To me, the most obvious overwhelming reason why women in the United States often don’t breastfeed is that we have six weeks of unpaid leave and no further maternity leave, so it’s literally physically hard to do. We’re getting better but aren’t that great at giving women safe spaces to breastfeed. It’s wonderful that there’s been a movement to let women breastfeed in public. But honestly, a lot of women don’t want to breastfeed in public because it’s stressful, and it’s awkward, and they don’t want to do that. Giving women more spaces to do it, giving them more privacy, giving them more time off work would, I think, be the main things that would increase breastfeeding rates. The really important point about breastfeeding in this American context is, every woman has already gotten the message over and over and over again that breastfeeding is better for their baby. They know that already, so trying to guilt them into it or give them that message over and over again is pointless and guilt inducing. If they’re not breastfeeding, it’s because there are other barriers that are making it hard for them to do. The fact of the matter is, they’re harming their baby virtually zero by not breastfeeding. . If they’re not breastfeeding, it’s because there are other barriers that are making it hard for them to do. The fact of the matter is, they’re harming their baby virtually zero by not breastfeeding. And in fact, if they breastfed a little at the beginning, they’re arguably harming their baby zero. Our approach should be the twin approach of supporting breastfeeding better, and then leaving women alone when they choose not to do it for whatever reason or can’t do it for whatever reason.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.