Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (112 page)

Oxytocin and prolactin also set the stage for adequate milk supply. Mothers who nurse right after delivery have fewer problems as well. These hormones help contract the mother’s uterus, for example, which helps the placenta separate naturally and thus decreases blood loss. In addition, breast milk is different from cow’s milk or formula, and it is unique in that its composition changes over time
depending on the needs of the baby
.

Children who have been breast-fed have one-third fewer hospitalizations than those who are bottle-fed, and they have many fewer allergies. Babies who are breast-fed have a more normal dental arch and palate than those who are bottle-fed. One meticulous study even showed that premature babies fed breast milk had higher intelligence quotients, which is because of breast milk’s beneficial effects on neural development.
²⁰
(This study was unusual in that the babies were fed either formula or breast milk by tube, in order to control for the known beneficial effects associated with actually holding a baby close to the mother’s body during breast-feeding.) It is a well-known fact that the composition of human breast milk is superior to that found in any formula, including its balance of the essential fatty acids so necessary for brain development.

Most women have to go back to work when their babies are six weeks old, making it much more difficult to breast-feed. (Our lack of maternity leave is an issue in itself. According to a 2004 Harvard study that examined policies in 168 nations, 163 of them offered some form of national paid maternity leave. Only the United States, Australia, Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland did not. Mothers in the United States are guaranteed only twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave, and even then only if they work for a company with at least fifty employees.)
²¹
Many mothers who are in that position have told me that they do not intend to nurse at all. They feel six weeks is so short a time that there’s no point. But women who have to go back to work and don’t feel that they can pump could still nurse, even if it’s just for that first six weeks. Even nursing for only the first few days would be valuable because the antibodies in the colostrum would give the baby’s health a head start that no artificial formula can provide. We only kid ourselves when we think that baby formula can do as good a job as na ture. No amount of scientific experimentation can come up with food that is more specifically made for a baby than its mother’s milk. (Thankfully, however, baby formula is now being manufactured with the all-important fatty acids DHA [docosahexaenoic acid] and AA [arachidonic acid]. Examples include Enfamil Lipil, Nestlé Good Start Supreme, Similac Advance, Bright Beginnings, and Parent’s Choice. Both of these fats are crucial for optimal brain, heart, and immune system development. Hydrolyzed baby formulas such as Enfamil Nutramigen Lipil, Enfamil Pregestamil, and Similac Alimentum, which contain “comfort proteins” that are easier for babies to digest, are also now available.)

Breast-feeding, in addition to all its other benefits, is also more convenient than carrying around a bunch of bottles, particularly while traveling. I nursed discreetly in restaurants, medical meetings, movies, and theaters. Usually no one noticed. Some, such as Bernie Siegel, M.D., congratulated me and thought it was wonderful. (Some babies are really loud nursers and sound like little piglets, however, so you have to adapt to their behavior and be considerate.) If I had to be away from my babies, I expressed my breast milk into bottles and froze it so that it could be thawed and fed to them in my absence. Both children took both the breast and the bottle, so I had a win-win situation. (So-called nipple confusion resulting from both breast-and bottle-feeding is actually not that common.)

The late renowned anthropologist Ashley Montagu, Ph.D., who advocated breast-feeding for years before it caught on in the modern Western countries, once said, “We learn to be human at our mother’s breast.” Breastfeeding is one of the most natural, nurturing things that a woman can do for herself and her baby. Yet we live in a culture in which it’s perfectly acceptable to walk down the beach in a string bikini but it is not always acceptable to breast-feed an infant in a public place. That is seen as “obscene.” Mothers who nurse toddlers are judged as being somehow “unnatural,” fostering unnecessary dependence of the child, though it’s been shown that people who feel the most secure in later life are those who had very healthy physical and emotional bonds with their mothers in childhood. The newest research on boys shows how important a solid bond with their mothers is—a bond that we shouldn’t be overly quick to sever. Children who feel most secure in their childhoods often are willing to take the most risks later in life. Only in a dominator culture would we get the idea that it “spoils” children to pick them up when they cry and to comfort them when they need it. (An aside: Why should adults get to sleep with someone, while children have to sleep alone?)

Our culture’s priorities are completely reversed from what they should be, especially at a time when it has become so hard for mothers to nurture their children adequately and still make a living. I changed my priorities after my own personal wounding with a large breast abscess that developed when I was attempting to work eighty hours per week while trying to prove myself in my group practice—and at the same time provide my firstborn with a diet that was 100 percent breast milk. The abscess, which was invading the muscles of my chest wall, eventually required emergency surgery. The surgeon, who had more than thirty years of experience, told me later that he had never seen an abscess that severe. (I diagnosed it myself at the office—when I stuck a needle into my breast and drew out 10 cc of pus. Such was my immersion in the dominator system. But I knew I was in trouble and finally asked for help.) Fast-forward two and a half years. On the third day after my second daughter’s birth, I noticed that milk didn’t seem to be coming out of my right nipple. Then the full impact of the damage I had done to myself more than two years earlier hit me fully. I wanted to sob. I remember sitting on my bed, looking down at my beautiful new baby girl, and thinking, “Here you are, and I can’t even feed you properly because I screwed up my body two years ago trying to prove I was a man.” I
was
able to nurse, but I couldn’t maintain an adequate milk supply most of the time and had to supplement with formula, especially whenever I was away from home long enough to miss a feeding.

I came face-to-face with the fact that I had done irrevocable damage to myself. I’d been taught it was normal to feel the “baby blues” on about the third day after a baby was born, but my own depression was exacerbated by the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to nurse Kate completely normally. In fact, on her second day of life I had to supplement her diet with formula. I knew that her stools would im mediately start to smell bad. The stools of a breast-fed baby smell like buttermilk because of the bacterial balance. Changing a diaper is a completely different experience with a breast-fed baby. But once you add other food sources, the bacteria change and the smell becomes pu trid!

Even though doctors know that exclusive breast-feeding is best for mother and baby, a recent survey conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that now, compared with ten to twenty years ago, fewer pediatricians believe that most women are able to nurse successfully and that the benefits of breast-feeding outweigh the difficulties or inconvenience, leaving doctors less likely to actively promote and support it.
²²
In addition, formula companies exert plenty of pressure of their own.
Mothering
magazine publisher and editor Peggy O’Mara writes in a recent article on the subject, “It is no coincidence that the formula industry nearly doubled its advertising, to almost $50 million a year, as soon as the Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign [a three-year media campaign to promote breastfeeding initiated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in late 2003] was launched. This aggressive advertising of formula is one of the chief obstacles to breastfeeding success, and the domination of health by profit is a classic feminist issue.”
²³

While almost three-quarters of all mothers in the United States begin breast-feeding their newborns, CDC statistics show that by the time their babies reach six months, fewer than 15 percent of mothers are still exclusively breast-feeding.
²⁴
Our culture discourages breast-feeding with the declaration that nursing “ruins” women’s breasts. Some women who’ve nursed a couple of chil dren do notice that their breasts don’t look the same. For a while they can be quite flaccid, and it can take several years after pregnancy and nursing to regain their shape. This usually reverses over time, but that flat appearance, even when it is only temporary, is not what our culture deems attractive.
²⁵
This was illustrated to me once when a friend who had nursed several children told me the following story. She was undressing one night when her four-year-old son walked in. He looked at her chest, looked up at her, and said, “Mom, what happened to your breasts? They died!” Rapid weight loss caused by inadequate food intake while nursing or prolonged nursing with adequate food intake can deplete the fat stores in the breasts and exacerbate this effect. Rapid weight loss also decreases milk supply.

The experience of producing milk, nursing a baby, and feeling the milk “let down” in response to the baby’s cries, or even in response to a mother’s own thoughts about the baby, is an experience that connects women everywhere. The midwife who delivered Kate used to tell me that she felt her own let-down reflex many times when she heard a baby cry or was aware of a child in need—even after her kids were in college. I, too, can still feel that tingling sensation in my breasts occasionally, especially when I’m feeling a great deal of compassion or appreciation for something or someone. It’s my body’s way of telling me that I have some love to give to a person or situation. Many women experience this. Our breasts, through this feeling, are reflecting the truth of the concept of “the milk of human kindness.” (It has also been demonstrated that levels of the hormone prolactin—which is necessary to produce milk—increase when one is feeling this compassion, love, or appreciation.)

When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that fifty years of technology is superior to three million years of nature’s evolution. Countless women have regained trust in their bodies through nursing their children, even if they weren’t sure at first that they could do it. It is an act of female power, and I think of it as feminism in its purest form. One of my friends recently said, “Breast-feeding my son gave me more confidence in myself as a woman than anything I’d ever done before. I felt so powerful.”

Newborns who are treated gently are very beautiful. I’ve seen in their eyes very wise old souls in tiny bodies fresh from God. I heard the following true story at my office. After one couple had their second son, their four-year-old kept wanting time alone with the baby. They were a bit reluctant, feeling that sibling rivalry might be a factor. But the four-year-old kept insisting. Finally they let him have some time alone with the baby. Listening quietly at the door, they heard him ask the baby, “Please tell me what God is like. I’m starting to forget.”

V
ACCINES
: H
ELPFUL OR
H
ARMFUL?

While the idea behind vaccines is certainly a good one—preventing diseases that can be fatal—the truth is that health is
not
a matter of avoiding all infectious diseases. In fact, childhood illnesses are necessary to mature the immune system and render it resilient in the same way that children need to learn to tolerate disappointment to develop into mature adults.

While most parents of baby boomers received only one vaccine (for smallpox), by the early 1980s children were routinely receiving ten vaccinations before they started school—and today they get fifty-five doses before they turn six. As I wrote in my book
Mother-
Daughter Wisdom,
I am concerned by the sheer number of vaccines very young children receive today. I believe that they are connected not only to an increase in childhood asthma and allergies but also to the increase in diabetes, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism. By immunizing against so many childhood diseases, we may be unwittingly creating suboptimal immune resilience that is coming out as chronic disease. Although this idea is controversial, evidence does exist for it in the medical literature.
²⁶

The bottom line is that vaccines are neither 100 percent safe nor 100 percent effective. They often contain preservatives that prevent bacterial or fungal contamination, as well as adjuvants—substances that cause inflammation, thus activating the immune system so the vaccine will have the intended effect. Adjuvants often contain mercury or aluminum, which can be toxic to the nervous system as well as to the kidneys. (For example, a study published in 2009 in the
Journal of Neurological Sciences
showed that children with severe autism spectrum disorder [ASD] had significantly higher levels of mercury intoxication compared with those with mild ASD.
²⁷
And studies in both 2008 and 2009 published in
Alternative Therapies in
Health and Medicine
show a link between vaccines and chronic inflammation of brain tissue, which harms nerve cells and is present in individuals with autism.)
²⁸
Vaccines contain many other substances as well—any of which can cause an adverse reaction when injected. While clearly not everyone is susceptible to these, children who either have a genetic predisposition or who are exposed to other compromising environmental factors may indeed suffer tragically debilitating effects from vaccines ironically designed to keep them healthy.