In my earlier post on the ethics of accepting money from pump companies, I
didn't mean to suggest that pumps were *never* necessary or *never* useful.
I was objecting to the assumption of many people (LCs, doctors/nurses, pump
companies!) that EVERY breastfeeding woman NEEDS a pump in order to
successfully breastfeed.  If you live in a breastfeeding-friendly culture,
then you can breastfeed wherever you are, and you can take your baby to work
with you, or have them on-site in child care and go nurse them whenever
you/they need to nurse.  Also, manual expression works great if someone
teaches you how to do it.  This assumption that every new mother leaving the
hospital breastfeeding needs a pump in her take-home bag is ludicrous.
Promoting the idea that every breastfeeding mother needs a pump is part and
parcel of medicalizing breastfeeding, and if we make it seem as though
pumping is a normal part of breastfeeding a baby, then it will take even
longer to have decent maternity leaves and on-site child care for moms to go
breastfeed.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Texas A&M University