I am still working my way through Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book Mother Nature,
and just finished a chapter in which she discusses, among other things,
induced lactation. She claims that most descriptions of induced lactation
(in the pre-electric-pump era) involve old women or grandmothers, generally
postmenopausal, who had bf earlier in their lives and now relactate many
years later to feed an orphaned or fostered infant.
Of course these are women who still have ovaries, but more or less
nonfunctioning. (have I got the physiology of menopause right here?)
Btw, for those who followed some discussion last week about wet-nursing, she
has a whole chapter about the history of wet-nursing, how it worked in
various cultures, why mothers came to choose it, etc.
One of the things I really like about the book is that she has a really
complex view of maternal choices and in particular of lactation choices.
She makes no bones about the fact that bf saves infant lives, that in most
human cultures choosing NOT to bf your infant was essentially choosing to be
willing to see that baby die, and even that in today's high tech west, where
most babies who are not bf don't die, choosing not to bf STILL represents a
lower level of investment in the child that will have measurable
consequences, at least at the population level, in decreasing that child's
life expenctancy and chance for future reproductive succeess.
On the other hand, she takes seriously the many reasons that mothers who long
to lovingly raise children might rationally limit their investment in their
child that way and in other ways (right on up to infanticide) in certain
ecological situations (and ecology here includes many cultural effects), and
sees those as predictable and human choices. So she produces better
understanding of the phenomema, I think, by looking at causes instead of
moralizing.
ESU
***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|
