Janice, why do you refuse to buy Linda Blum's book?

Certainly it is not a piece of bf advocacy -- but that there is a whole lot
in it that bf advocates can learn from.   I'd agree with Magda that the
chapter on African American working class mothers has a lot of eloquent
testimony from them on why bf just doesn' t make sense to them no matter how
healthy they know it to be.

In a way it reminds me of things Barbara Wilson-Clay has written reminding us
that if a baby has to choose between, say, breathing and eating, it is
"normal" for that baby to prefer breathing.   Blum is looking at cultural
choices of mothers, and reminding us that they also feel that it is "normal"
for them to prefer some other good over the acknowledged good of bf.

These mothers are out there -- ignoring them won't make them go away.   And
if Blum is unwilling to call biological norms  just plain "norms" because she
is considering culture rather than biology, well, at least she agrees with us
that the question is not "why would anyone bf?" but "why would anyone not?"
She clearly would like to see more women bf their babies -- she just doesn't
think that the whole experience is sunrise and roses for everyone who does
it.  And I would hope that we don't think so either.

The book is pretty academic in its language, which sometimes means
PC-apologetic and sometimes just oblique.  If you believe bf is normal and
"true" to human life, then you may not like hearing those positions called an
"ideology." But being true and being an ideology are not incompatible.

It ain't perfect, but there's a lot to learn in it all the same.  And,
Janice, you can't learn from a book you refuse to buy.

Nor do you encourage research on why women do or do not bf if the books that
are published on this subject are boycotted by the only community of readers
likely to buy them!

I think that the communal self-censorship embodied in the refusal to buy a
book that MIGHT have ideas we disagree with on a topic that is important to
us, is a partial answer to Magda's question about why books like this are not
being written by people inside the lactation community.   And that's too bad.


Elisheva Urbas, lay bf agitator and book editor in NYC
I don't stand on a soapbox -- I pile up the books that are under the footwell
of my desk instead

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