I spoke with my colleague Barb Berhmann the other day. She is the author of The Breastfeeding Cafe: Mothers Share the Joys, Challenges and Secrets of Nursing, a beautiful example of what happens when you blend the best of intellectual analysis with women’s experience. Her book is rich with stories and commentary on breastfeeding in the United States. An eloquent statement to the realities of the times in which women undertake the feeding of their infants, through their bodies, in a culture where this is not the standard practice.

Do we care about mothers and babies in our culture? As of September 2006, there were only 55 hospitals and birth centers designated as 'baby friendly'. What does that make all the other places where babies are born? Here is all they have to do to become baby friendly (Mother Friendly is another story):

The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative promotes, protects, and supports breastfeeding through The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding for Hospitals, as outlined by UNICEF/WHO. The steps for the United States are:
1 - Maintain a written breastfeeding policy that is routinely communicated to all health care staff.
2 - Train all health care staff in skills necessary to implement this policy.
3 - Inform all pregnant women about the benefits and management of breastfeeding.
4 - Help mothers initiate breastfeeding within one hour of birth.
5 - Show mothers how to breastfeed and how to maintain lactation, even if they are separated from their infants.
6 - Give infants no food or drink other than breastmilk, unless medically indicated.
7 - Practice “rooming in”-- allow mothers and infants to remain together 24 hours a day.
8 - Encourage unrestricted breastfeeding.
9 - Give no pacifiers or artificial nipples to breastfeeding infants.
10 -Foster the establishment of breastfeeding support groups and refer mothers to them on discharge from the hospital or clinic

Ironically, just as the Ad Council public health campaigns, and politicians like Dennis Hastert spout off about putting warning labels on formula and exhort us to breastfeed our babies, women are still getting kicked off airplanes in Vermont for doing just that. What, breastfeed your baby but not in public? Stay home? Stay covered up? What is this, some far off fundamentalist world where women should do that reproductive business cloistered in the home? Ironically, the rest of the world is gawping at Britney’s slimmed abs and viewing Anna Nicole’s cesarean. What does it all mean?

Well, I know of a few sociologists and anthropologists who are examining these phenomena, and I’ll be highlighting their work and contributions in my next few posts. As Reproductive Issues play out in our personal, regional, national and international lives, I’ll be there to tell some of the stories I hear, from the intellectuals and the women I encounter.

Bodies change over time; how does birth fit in to this picture?

Interesting article on how much our body types have changed (ok, using records of MEN from war documents, but still).

How does this play into the natural childbirth notion of "women's bodies know what to do"? I've always had trouble with that argument, based on my understanding of nutrition, culture and illness in past times. And, as Sheryl Nestel points out in her article, "Other Mothers: race and representation in natural childbirth discourse" in Resources for Feminist Research Winter 1994/95, vol 23 (4):5, racial notions underlie much of the rhetoric in past efforts to promote natural childbirth. I especially appreciate her reading of the film "birth in the squatting position" as one which "depends for its resonance on powerful cultural understandings of the raced female body as primitively sexual and prolifically reproductive". How do we understand this film's place in efforts to promote unnecessary medical interventions?

In some ways, one would think that women's bodies would be even better equipped to give birth these days, with adequate nutrition, bigger bodies, etc. if we take the argument that bodies today are bigger, healthier because of adequate prenatal nourishment, and improved nutrition in the first two years of life.

Biology, culture and medical practice. A fluid and complex mix of forces..... food for thought.


HEALTH July 30, 2006
The New Age: So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You
By GINA KOLATA
The past 100 years has seen a change from small, sickly people to humans who are so robust their ancestors are almost unrecognizable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/health/30age.html?ex=1154923200&en=7ddec209c7d2821b&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Roe versus Reality — Abortion and Women's Health
Alexi A. Wright, M.D., and Ingrid T. Katz, M.D., M.H.S.
"Sandra Jones was on her way to a Nebraska operating room to have an abscess drained when she learned that, once again, she had defied medical odds. Six months earlier, doctors had diagnosed breast cancer in the 31-year-old mother of two. Because her test results were positive for the breast cancer susceptibility gene 1 (BRCA1) and she was at high risk for ovarian cancer and recurrent breast cancer, they had recommended bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy, and a hysterectomy, but Jones (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) was not ready to give up childbearing. Her doctors warned that though it would be extremely difficult for her to conceive after chemotherapy, she should actively avoid pregnancy for at least six months, since it would complicate her disease and the drugs would increase the risk of serious birth defects. After struggling through treatment, Jones returned home to find that her husband had left her. Now, a few weeks later, routine preoperative tests revealed that she was pregnant. "

This is an interesting look at the human costs of US abortion policy and politics.

I'm a sociologist navigating the world of women who create networks of care wherever they go. These networks of women occupy a particular niche - they cross lines of class, ethnic origin and emotional and physical health. They intersect people's lives when a new social being emerges. They are there to be available for liminal support, because it was during this liminal period that something transformative occurred.

Another sociologist writes a book showing how assuming the work of breastfeeding; sustaining another life, physically, is costly in terms of time and energy and also rewarding in terms of having a satisfying relationship with another human. Often, that satisfaction translates back into their own, satisfying lives. They role model satisfaction. except they complain, too. They complain about not having enough support for themselves, but believing that every woman deserves it, and men too. And babies and children too.

But what does this support really mean? How does it manifest itself in everyday lives?

All this for another day. I must go forage for food at my local Trader Joe's and deposit a small check in our credit union account. Greasing the wheels of everday life. While my husband attempts to edit two research papers while both children also 'read' on the bed with him, the memory foam bed, that has cuddled and embraced us to lovely periods of sleep. We bought a king size. We are able to invest in our lives, and it is highly satisfying. It is why we work with others to insist that we know of a type of care that we believe is so vital, that it should be supported. We have to tell these stories, though, or the structures that support these satisfying relationship practices will be threatened. And indeed, they are. But we reach out online to share with others in other geographic communities the bounty of what we have. Sometimes it is a story in exchange for relationship. An american midwife in Malawi is having her story shared with doulas in the Pacific Northwest, and material and informational resources are now flowing between these network nodes.

It is a means to survival. To be a key provider of quality, satisfying care to others, is to offer value in the world. It is rewarded, not always by money, but but other key values, which must and do co-exist with real economic difference. I know Microsoft retirees and single mothers on the edge, full time workers and entreprenurial, hard working women. They are always thinking, engaging, they are not afraid to go into the liminal space where one body becomes two.