Exploiting My Baby

They also are immune to disease, are more likely to win Nobel Prizes, recycle, live meaningful lives, understand James Joyce, love fully, donate to NPR pledge drives, stop to help distressed motorists, appreciate Rachmaninoff, have high credit scores, get appointed to important government posts, and have X-ray vision. Oh, and breast-fed babies live forever. The science on that isn’t totally in yet, but better safe than sorry.

Moreover, if you breast-feed, the baby weight will melt off of you. You will evade reproductive cancers. The release of the feel-good hormone oxytocin when your baby is “at your breast” will saturate your system with “delicious” feelings of attachment and contentment such as you have never experienced before. Mothers who miss out on this mommy morphine are likely to leave their babies in the middle of the road to be pecked at by turkey vultures.

Okay, that’s not totally true. Some mothers who skip this crucial biological bonding experience will simply leave their child in a basket at a fire station with $5 and half a pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol Ultra Lights in a box.

Breast-fed babies will have fewer ear infections, allergies, stomach ailments and a much lower chance of obesity. They will have higher IQ scores. So say the adherents. So says the teacher of this class, a tall, fit, broad-shouldered woman in her fifties who looks like she played high school volleyball.

A room full of us pregnant ladies, shifting around in uncomfortable plastic chairs and gnawing on free cookies with our husbands, are also given a stern warning: Never ever let the baby out of your sight at the hospital once it is born.

Some sleepy, overworked, well-meaning but ultimately venal nurse is going to hear it cry and give it ... well, what might as well be a cocktail of lead paint, asbestos juice and Southern Comfort: formula. That’s right, your precious baby’s ability to be exclusively fed at your breast, the way god and Mother Nature intended, will be forever compromised if you don’t step up with some major vagina power and tell the nurses they are not taking your baby out of your sight for one single second at the hospital. Once that baby gets away from you and into the hospital nursery, it’s a free-for-all and you can kiss your dreams of attending your child’s inauguration good-bye. Once it gets a taste of that plastic nipple and guzzles away at that easy-access bottle, forget that child loving you, crafting you handmade cards or even sitting in your lap.

We also learn some of the more subtle differences between bottle-and breast-fed babies. Like, babies who are bottle-fed stink. They smell foul. As for breast-fed tykes, their shit literally doesn’t stink, though it may be an alarming shade of black before it goes mustard yellow and seedy.

On the other hand, outside of the beige and pastel pink confines of this breast-feeding store, which is tucked away in an urban strip mall in Hollywood, out in the real mom world, some of my girlfriends just didn’t take to breast-feeding, and their kids seem fine. From my unscientific sampling of moms I know who chose to bottle-feed, I see no asthma, no allergies and no bonding problems with the babies. The moms lost the baby weight just fine. I’m not sure if the kids are a ticking time bomb or the moms are just enjoying a few years until the uterine cancer kicks in, but it seems unlikely. I also know mothers who were literally sick with grief when they couldn’t breast-feed because their babies had a “weak suck” or they just didn’t produce enough of the magical elixir to keep the little ones alive. I’m not sure why these women, who did their best, read every book and took every class, and dragged their newborns to appointments with lactation specialists, should be made to feel selfish and negligent because breast-feeding didn’t work out for them.

From where I sit—on my now numb ass—it seems like support groups for breast-feeding women are redundant. This whole culture, at least out here in Los Angeles, supports breast-feeding women. The gals who really need a safe place to compare notes and not have to hide from formula-sniffing dogs and do-gooding busybodies are the formula-feeding moms. There is so much pressure for women to succeed at the boob-feeding that if they fail they feel like they have to hide out so some idiot doesn’t spy a packet of powdered Enfamil in their diaper bag and chime in with the now standard “breast is best.” I buy that breast is best, but it isn’t always possible or practical, and I kind of just think we should stay the hell out of each other’s bras.

It’s difficult to find an expert or parent who doesn’t have a horse in the breast-feeding versus formula race, which makes it hard for us pregnant girls to truly understand our options and their repercussions. To be fair, hard data is difficult to come by, because there are so many variables that go into a child’s intelligence, or propensity toward allergies, or ability to bond.

Obviously, an over-Googling, fear-based creature like me is attracted to the idea of inoculating my child against all ills with my magical breasts, but there is also the matter of working to consider. At some point, me and the rest of the employed, semi-employed and hoping or needing to be employed moms in this class won’t be able to be around our babies every two to three hours, and though we can pump (they sell all manner of pumps at this store and others), that seems like having a second full-time job. All of this may be—probably is—worth it for the miraculous antibodies breast milk reportedly provides, but it’s still a major time “suck ” if it works, and a major mouthful of guilt if it doesn’t.

Our statuesque teacher, a certified lactation consultant and part owner of the store hosting the class, impresses me with her vast knowledge of boobies and extreme comfort in discussing latching and leaking. She even has a pink velveteen dummy breast, on which she demonstrates various breast-feeding holds. However, when she tells us about her own kids and mentions how healthy the now grown offspring are, she adds that one of them has a little bit of asthma, only when he runs. Wait a second; you mean this panacea doesn’t work for someone who was breast-fed for two years?

Now that is some backward, biased data analysis if I’ve ever heard it. Look, the kid has respiratory problems and his mom is a lactation lady who did nothing but breast-feed him the “right” way for two years straight. That means one-third of her three children has asthma. How can this fact fit into the hypothesis that breast milk effectively staves off breathing problems? Would it really have been worse without the breast milk? No one can know that for sure, and while I like this woman, and her good posture and better diction, she does seem to be using a logic shoehorn to make sense of her own experience.

Along with the demonstration and lecture, we are also shown a grainy VHS movie, the production values of which can only be compared to an early snuff film, featuring a freckled, naked mother just after giving birth.

Her baby, possibly of German descent but it’s hard to tell because there is no dialogue, is placed on her chest and allowed to root around until she finds the nipple. This process takes about half an hour, after which the girl finds the boob and suckles away. I must admit that it’s beautiful to see, and who wouldn’t want such a natural, easy first nursing experience, a newborn all calm and snuggly on her mother’s chest? The lactation lady warns us of the dangers of getting the wrong kind of latch, which would be painful and perhaps impede the child’s ability to get enough milk. The imperfect latch could lead to nipple scabbing—for which the store sells plenty of remedies, of course—and we should be careful to gently open the baby’s jaw downward and mush the nipple out with our hands so the kid gets kind of a flesh sandwich, with a nice full mouth of both nipple and areola. I start to fade with mental overload and whisper to my husband, “Are you getting this?”

“Yes. Sandwich latch. Got it,” he answers, looking down at his watch. The room is stuffy. I notice a couple of the other husbands nodding out, but this isn’t latch lady’s first day at the sleepy husband rodeo.

When it’s Q & A time, I sheepishly inquire as to how long one should nurse a baby for maximum benefit (subtext, What’s the least amount of time I can nurse a baby before I return to my life without everyone judging me?). Subtext is not something lactation lady misses. She runs her fingers through her expertly highlighted blond hair and sighs dramatically, clearly unhappy with my tone.

“I don’t know your baby yet. All babies are different. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breast-feeding for six months exclusively and for the first year with solid foods, but you do what you can.” I can’t be sure, but from the way she stops looking in my direction for the rest of the class, I think she has dismissed me as someone not seriously dedicated to breast-feeding and already eyeing the finish line before I’ve even begun. What I’m really eyeing is the El Pollo Loco next door, hoping it will still be open when this shindig ends so I can get a burrito bowl for the road.

There was a time when women were essentially forced to bottle-feed by doctors and hospitals and prevented from caring for their babies in a way that seems both best for the baby (even if only marginally) and righteous. Breast-feeding was once seen as low-class, while mothers of means chose the bottle and were proud to do so, because they could afford it and because the prevailing wisdom was that formula was more “hygienic.”

There was a time when the hospital knocked moms out, yanked your baby away from you after birth and generally ignored what we now understand to be the importance of skin-to-skin contact, bonding, nursing right after birth, and so on. Betty Draper and her real-life counterparts got screwed, for sure. At this point, however, it seems the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, so that women for whom breast-feeding just doesn’t make sense or feel right, or for whom it’s physically impossible, are vilified as selfish, lazy, impatient baby haters. Intolerance stinks worse than a formula-fed baby’s poop. It stinks on both sides of the intolerance diaper.

Look, I’m going to give breast-feeding a try, and I hope it works. But if it doesn’t happen, or if maybe I’m not the nurse-for-two-years kind of girl, I hope the milk of human kindness is also available in formula.