This is a response to the issue of inducing guilt in mothers who can't/won't/don't breastfeed by promoting breastfeeding through BFHI. I've been studying the rhetoric of the discourses concerning infant feeding in the U.S. for about 7 years now, and this is what I conclude about the "guilt issue": First, Lawrence says, in the 4th edition of Breastfeeding: A Guide for the Medical Profession, that there are no studies proving that promoting breastfeeding induces guilt in women. Instead, she writes, "There are no studies in the literature that support this position [denying mothers information about breastfeeding in order to avoid inculcating guilt]. In the dozens of reports on efforts to increase breastfeeding among many cultures, there is no report of producing guilt feelings. Women interviewed in open-ended questionnaires have not mentioned guilt feelings in response to the questioning. The only individuals who ever mention guilt are the older generation whose daughters are now choosing breastfeeding. The grandmother feels guilty because noone [sic] ever told her; noone [sic] ever encouraged her to breastfeed" (199). Second, as some of the previous posts have indicated, the focus on guilt promotes a focus on individual women and the effect of their supposedly autonomous decisions in a context that we know is influenced by a myriad of factors, ranging from how we are raised to perceive bottle feeding as normal to contemporary pressures to separate from our infants when they are very young to employment situations that make the continuation of breastfeeding difficult if not impossible. It is also important to see how women are made to feel responsible for all sorts of aspects of their children's experiences that they cannot possibly control. Third, guilt is only possible when breastfeeding and bottle feeding with infant formula are equated as basically the same, with breastfeeding offering additional optimizing benefits. As noted by others, there are plenty of behaviors we feel quite justified in making people feel guilty about, but they tend to be ones that are understood culturally to have recognizably dire effects (such as smoking or not putting a baby in a car seat). Thus, the guilt that is said to arise from an emphasis on breastfeeding or from the instantiation of BFHI arises because there is still not a baseline cultural understanding of how breastfeeding is the normative practice from which formula feeding deviates. How to change this situation is unclear to me, because it's like arguing that driving a car to work every day has negative effects on the environment--we know it, but our lives (in the U.S. at least) are structured around car culture. Fourth, the opposite of guilt in this scenario is empowerment. The difficulty that many women face is that breastfeeding represents an ideal of mothering (I'm talking about how the dominant American culture represents it) that is difficult for them to realize in practice. Problematically, this view is sometimes promoted by overly romanticized representations of the benefits of breastfeeding. What I'm getting at here is that many women, even most women, recognize the benefits of breastfeeding (Lawrence argues this in another article) but cannot see how to actualize it in practice--either because they cannot approach their own bodies in this way, or because they do not have support from family or employers to do so (these are only examples). The BFHI is an important step, but only refers to the hospital setting. How can women be empowered--in psychological, political, and material terms--to fight for the right to information about and support for breastfeeding? How can we transform the debate so that it is not about the guilt of individual women but about the right to adequate health care and to community support for maternity? I'm sorry that this post is so long, but I wanted to offer the insights of an "outsider" to this debate. I'm looking forward to the ILCA meeting in Sydney, where I'll be giving a talk. I find the discussions on LACT-NET so stimulating. Bernice Hausman ******************************************************** Bernice L. Hausman Associate Professor English Dept. (0112) Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA 24061 540-231-5076 (office) 540-231-5692 (fax) [log in to unmask] http://athena.english.vt.edu/~hausman/hausman.html *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] 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 ********************************************************