09/10/2020
This is a long read, but hopefully worth it.
I think one of the most toxic and insidious pieces of gaslighting I see in the world today is society utterly failing to support women to birth their baby the way they want, feed their baby the way they want and parent their baby the way they want. Then, instead of taking responsibility for that catastrophic public health failure, society turns round and tells women it was their own fault. Their weak, incompetent female bodies just aren’t capable of their basic bioloical functions, so aren’t they lucky there’s some clever alternative on hand for them.
Women’s bodies routinely fall through the cracks when it comes to public health awareness and education, in every conceivable way. Many of us come out of our s*x education lessons not knowing the difference between a va**na and a v***a. However, most people could tell you the difference between a p***s and a set of testicles. So let’s not pretend that teaching correct names for our anatomy is somehow too hard. Menstruation is seen as something taboo, dirty, embarrassing, shameful, something to be hidden away at all costs. And I mean at all costs, as in women with abnormal va**nal bleeding end up being too embarrassed to go to their GP, so if it turns out to be an early warning sign of cancer it gets missed. This nonsense has a death toll attached to it. When we talk about ‘any cost’ we’re talking about it costing lives.
And breasts are even more confusing. Breasts are beautiful, right? Obviously. And men like them, and because obviously the primary function of a woman’s existence is to be pleasing to the male gaze, she should show them off, right? But not too much because if you show them off too much then you’re practically asking to be s*xually assaulted. So, you should also cover up. And, my God if you show the barest millimetre of female ar**la or ni**le (ar**la is the bit that surrounds the ni**le- again something people don’t know the word for) then you want locking up immediately for public indecency. Your great Uncle Ted whose fondness for cream cakes has left him sporting a cracking set of C-cups though, he can walk around shirtless at the beach, showing off his male ni**les till the cows come home. It’s all a bit ‘Women! Know your place!’ isn’t it?
And remember, as a woman you can never actually like your own body. No, the moment you do that people will start talking about how vain, and conceited, and full of yourself you are. So you must exist in a permanent state of thinking you’re too fat, too thin, your hair is too dark, too blonde, your breasts are too big, too small, the wrong shape, you’re too tall, too short, your thighs are the wrong shape. You must eternally purchase a small fortune's worth of products to try and make your body more appealing to the male gaze, but spoiler alert, you’ll never actually achieve the perfection you seek, because society will invent new imperfections to keep you insecure and spending money. Imagine how many companies would go out of business tomorrow if every woman in the world woke up actually loving her own body?
Giving birth and breastfeeding are no different. By the time a woman gets round to the point of giving birth, and feeding her baby she has already been emotionally conditioned from her earliest childhood to feel like her body isn’t good enough, and that it's almost certain to let her down. This message, sadly is reinforced even more strongly during pregnancy when women are often bombarded with horror stories about labour, delivery, and breastfeeding.
Imagine, for a minute, if boys and young men were told, just coming into s*xual maturity were bombarded constantly with messages that their p***ses were very prone to failing, and that it was best to put their faith in technology and keep a box of vi**ra in their back pocket at all times. Do you think that would help them feel at ease, and confident in their bodies, or do you think at best the added stress and anxiety would negatively affect them, and at worst lead to outright s*xual dysfunction?
It’s little wonder then, isn’t it, that women go into pregnancy, labour and birth almost with the expectation that their body won’t be capable of birthing, and feeding their baby. It’s not surprising that when women suffer sore ni**les they believe that that’s normal and it’s just something wrong with them, they just need to try and push through it, maybe it’s because they’ve got a low pain threshold, or they have fair skin or red hair. If her baby isn’t gaining the correct amount of weight it must be because there’s something wrong with her body. Women have been bombarded their whole lives with the message that their body is incompetent, and wrong, so if she has problems breastfeeding the natural next step is to blame herself, and her body.
On top of that because our misogynistic, patriarchal society has decreed that women’s health issues, including breastfeeding are totally unimportant there is often little to no help to be found. We spend more money researching erectile dysfunction than we do on breastfeeding research. It is unimaginable to us that a man could walk into a GPs office suffering erectile dysfunction only to be told ‘Ah well now, Bob, you’ve successfully been having s*x for over 10 years now, that’s a pretty good innings. That’s a lot more s*x than some people get, so you should be proud of yourself to have been able to do it for this long. Don’t worry about it, it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. I tell you, if I lined 100 men up in a room would you be able to tell me which ones were having s*x, and which ones weren’t? Of course not, so what’s the big deal? At the end of the day your wife can just order herself a vi****or, and get pleasure that way. If anything it might even be better for you because you’ll know she’s definitely getting pleasure, and you can even have a rest while she uses it.’. But that’s pretty much how mothers with breastfeeding problems get fobbed off, all the damn time. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not important, just use some formula, it doesn’t matter….’
Now, obviously there are some women who genuinely cannot breastfeed. That’s very real, it’s valid, and those mothers matter. However the mothers we’re addressing in this essay are the 80% of mothers who are forced to stop breastfeeding in the early weeks, who not only wanted to continue, but feel they could have continued if they had had access to the right support (figure from Public Health England). Those mothers, and the number adds up to hundreds of thousands of very real women, who were left alone, stressed, anxious, in pain, bleeding had their reproductive rights, their freedom of choice to breastfeed stolen from them by a society that simply doesn’t care enough to provide them with the support they needed. This leaves them at far greater risk of developing a post-natal mental illness, for which again there isn’t nearly enough help and support available. Oh, and on top of all this the leading cause of death in new mothers is su***de. So once again women are dying because society just doesn’t deem their health issues worth caring about.
So why is breastfeeding so important to women? Right well first of all women don’t owe you an explanation of why breastfeeding is important to them. Women do not have to justify why breastfeeding matters to them. If a woman wants to breastfeed, if it matters to her, if it’s important to her then that’s all you need to know. We’re not asking old Bob with his erectile dysfunction at the GP’s office to quickly write out a 2000 word essay outlining why s*x is important to thim now are we? We just accept it. Women deserve the same.
But since you’re here there are a number of reasons why breastfeeding is important to mothers. The health benefits, the bonding experience, for some it can help them recover from a traumatic birth, some abuse victims find that it helps them to reclaim and reconnect with their bodies, for some women breastfeeding has enormous cultural significance. And the health benefits in particular are something that most women are informed of during pregnancy. We spend 9 months telling women that ‘breast is best’. And then, in an act that can only be described as wanton cruelty, society utterly fails to support them.
Telling a woman to breastfeed, and then failing to support her to enable and empower her to do so is despicable. Our hearts all go out to the contestants on The Great British Bake Off when Paul Hollywood sets them a particularly difficult technical challenge, and they have no idea what they’re supposed to be baking and the deliberately vague recipe just says ‘bake a cake’. But that’s literally what society is doing to new mothers when it comes to breastfeeding.
Actually it’s worse than that because a lot of us might have a vague idea on how to bake a cake, maybe we had cookery at school, or our Nan’s baked, or we watched a cookery show once. No-one anywhere, ever taught me a thing about breastfeeding. The first time I actually saw a woman breastfeeding was me trying to feed my first child. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
And just to add yet another little twist to the knife, we’re told that breastfeeding is easy, breezy, natural. Yes, breastfeeding is natural, but it’s not natural like breathing, which almost all of us can do automatically without effort or thought. Breastfeeding is natural like walking, something almost everyone can do, but a skill that needs to be taught, and that takes time and practice to master. When we’re learning to walk and we fall down we don’t take that as a sign that we can’t walk, but when we hit a bump in the road with breastfeeding and fall down a lot of women think that means they just can’t do it, because no-one has ever informed them otherwise.
So where is the support? Well our front line of support is supposed to come from our extended family and friends. Humans are an aggressively social species, we became the dominant species on the planet because this system of community helped us thrive. New mothers aren’t supposed to do this on their own, they’re supposed to be able to relax and recover, while their community looks after them, brings them food, takes care of chores etc. For the most part we don’t have that any more, it’s now rare for mothers to have a village around them, so new mothers find themselves in the position, sometimes days or even hours after giving birth of trying to get to grips with breastfeeding, a brand new skill she and her baby need to learn together, while trying to stay on top of housework, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping etc.
And any village that might exist has been poisoned by decades of misinformation about how formula is just as good, if not better than breastfeeding, babies should only feed every 4 hours, if you hold your baby too much you’ll spoil them and they’ll never be independent. My village felt like it was sponsored by Nestle, they were so insistent that switching to formula would solve all my problems, my baby would sleep more, I wouldn’t be so stressed, elves would descend from the heavens and clean my house while I slept...Great Aunt Galdys over there giving it all ‘Back in my day……’ Aye well, Gladys back in your day smallpox was still a thing so let’s not pretend the good old days were all that good.
So maybe we can at least turn to health care professionals? Hmmmmm maybe. Now I don’t want to malign health care professionals as a whole because there are some absolutely wonderful, wonderful midwives, health visitors and doctors out there who are incredibly well informed and absolutely supportive of breastfeeding. However I’m also not going to pretend that there aren’t also healthcare professionals out there who are sometimes giving out damaging misinformation due to a lack of knowledge and training. And on top of that due to a lack of funding and resources many health care professionals are being left carrying absolutely eye watering case loads, so they simply don’t have the time to effectively help with breastfeeding. With the best will in the world you cannot fit adequate breastfeeding support into a 10 minute appointment.
But hey there’s always the voluntary sector providing breastfeeding support, right? I mean yeah, there are breastfeeding helplines, there’s a wealth of information on-line, and that’s great, but there are breastfeeding problems that require face to face support. Not only that but a big part of the reassurance provided by breastfeeding support drop ins is mums seeing other mums going through the same thing they’re going through and coming out the other side. But remember how society doesn’t value breastfeeding, or women in general? Yeah. So the government decided that what it would do was to delegate the responsibility for providing breastfeeding support to local authorities. Sounds good on paper right? The support needed in Harrow might be very different from what’s needed in Hull? But then the government decided it would cut funding to local authorities so their budgets were reduced resulting in breastfeeding support services being cut, and the government did absolutely diddly squat to ensure that local authorities upheld their responsibility to provide breastfeeding support.. The end result? Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and playing for the postcode lottery! Yes that’s right, now your postcode will determine what level of breastfeeding support you can access.
When we’re up against all that it’s no wonder that so many mothers feel they ‘couldn’t breastfeed’ what’s a true wonder is that some actually manage it in spite of all that.
For the vast majority of mothers in the UK, hundreds of thousands every single year you did not fail, you were failed. You were lied to, you were misled, you were let down, and then society turned round and told you it was all your own fault. And I’m so, so sorry. It wasn’t you, or your breasts or your baby, or your milk, it was government, industry and society. You are not responsible for a societal and public health failing. You deserved better.
Every day women are having their reproductive rights, their freedom of choice stripped from them because society fails us. If you’re not angry then you’re not paying attention.
Lisa Marie O'Sullivan and Hannah Cresswell
