Your brother’s aspirations are to be commended in attempting to find a feature film on marital and family issues that also include normalized breastfeeding/nursing. He may have more success in pulling up documentaries or for that matter dissecting a few episodes of “To Call the Midwife”.

Your query brings to the forefront, for many of us, the lack of positive representation of breastfeeding/nursing in the media. One of the challenges certainly lies in casting and having not only a lactating person on cast but also their nursing infant who is also part of the cast. A solution might be to begin to have parent/infant nursing dyads as extras (i.e. nursing in a park or the next table at a cafe, at the next cubicle at an office, etc) No explanation, no build-up to a milky lunch. It just is. 

My daughter, who I can’t reach right now for details, informed me several years ago about laws and limitations in the US around the casting of infant actors. Their roles are quite limited. 

I feel compelled to respond to the film suggested sooner than later and may find more eloquent ways to express my thoughts on this in the days to come but the scene described should not go unacknowledged. 

I’m not a breastfeeding historian but scenes portraying an indentured/enslaved Black-African woman nursing the child of a white colonizer would be entirely too complex for a family and marital conference topic promoting or normalizing breastfeeding/nursing UNLESS the subject was to really dig into and dissect the racist history of using and demeaning Black women and families, who often left their own biological children at home (if they had not already been stolen) with unmet needs while away caring for white babies and children. 

The feminist in me wonders if the scene was necessary for the film? Or if it fulfilled a fantasy of the director and film crew?  Having not seen the movie, it sounds like it certainly allowed for the continuation of the narrative that Black people were the nurturing caregivers that white children grew up to love but as adults got swallowed up in the culture of hate. I am sorry for the Black lactating actor, the white bio parent and the infant actor to have been asked to play these roles. 

Keyena McKenzie, ND, Midwife

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