Why breastfeeding is overrated

Almost 10 years ago, when my first of four sons was born, I struggled with breastfeeding.

The baby could not latch. From the moment we arrived home from the hospital, I succumbed to an all-too-common fate: pumping around the clock to get the alleged benefits of breast milk. Thus, I joined a warrior sisterhood: moms for whom breastfeeding is a battle but who endure adversity and ignore opportunity cost for that “liquid gold.”

Remember the unconscionably senseless measures taken ostensibly to combat coronavirus? Then you know what this kind of pseudo-scientific conspiracy on the left looks like. But unlike masks and school closures, the “breast is best” shibboleth boasts adherents on the right as well.

My tenure in this virtuous company was brief.

I hated lugging the pump on my train commute to work in the humidity of a Philadelphia summer. But like many mothers, I had no significant time off; I carried my family’s excellent health insurance through my university employer and had not yet been there long enough to earn maternity leave.

I loathed sleeping no more than 60 minutes at a stretch for weeks on end. But exclusively pumping for a newborn takes 12 hours a day: 30 minutes to feed from a bottle and 30 minutes to pump, every two hours — not to mention all the bottle and pump-part washing. I resented the inability to enjoy small things (like a fresh cup of coffee, an uninterrupted conversation with a friend, or my sweet baby himself) and to complete mundane tasks (like unloading the dishwasher). But I was chained to the pump.

As my supply dropped despite diligent pumping, I supplemented more and more with formula. I read up on the ostensible benefits of breast milk to understand how this formula feeding was going to negatively impact my son’s long-term health and IQ.

Superstition, not science

The unexpected answer? Not at all. “Breast is best,” I learned, is superstition dressed up as science.

As economist Emily Oster documented at length in 2018’s "Cribsheet," there is a vast scientific literature detailing the lack of any measurable differences in outcome between breast-fed and formula-fed babies once you control for the other variables associated with breastfeeding. In other words: All of the oft-touted “benefits” of breastfeeding are really benefits of the higher maternal income and education correlated with breastfeeding.

For example, breast milk does not raise IQ. Having a mother (and father) with a high IQ is what raises IQ. Higher intelligence correlates with income and education; hence, higher-intelligence mothers are more likely to breastfeed their babies.

After understanding this reality, I liberated myself from the pump and packed it away. I hypothesize that many of my fellow struggling-to-breastfeed moms would do the same and experience the same liberation, if they understood that the struggle is in fact for naught.

Make no mistake: If breastfeeding were easy for me, I would have done it. And my children would have been well nourished. But it wasn’t, so I didn’t. And my children have in point of fact been equally well nourished with formula.

So why is this canard that “breast is best” still so widely accepted and believed?

'Good mom' signaling

As a mom who got caught up in it myself despite my general rejection of pseudo-medical dogma, I can hazard an informed guess: Unlike almost any other sacred cow today, this myth about the benefits of breastfeeding has influential adherents across the ideological spectrum, not just on the left or on the right. Therefore, it seems nonideological.

In reality, though, breastfeeding mythology is deceptively ideological: It ensnares partisans on both sides, albeit for different reasons.

On the left, a mainstream feminism that disdains the traditional family has to invent ways to graft “feminist” value onto motherhood because some of its adherents still want to have children. When life is not an end in itself, it has to be justified by the identitarian posturing and in-group virtue-signaling of those who choose it. In that framework, many leftist moms who see parenthood as a morally neutral lifestyle choice also choose to breastfeed so that their kids will be healthy and smart.

From their perspective, many apolitical and conservative moms who see motherhood not as an intensive boutique hobby but as the near-universal vocation of female adulthood might or might not breastfeed because they do not really understand what’s good for kids. If they did, the condescending train of thought goes, none of them would vote Republican.

Given the already fraught issue of motherhood within the feminist self-conception, elite “good moms” will actively avoid scientific information that counteracts their ability to separate themselves from non-elite “regular moms.” The mythology of breast milk’s nutritional superiority is so useful as a vehicle for leftist identitarian posturing around maternity that it does not matter to some adherents whether it is true.

'Mask up!' redux

Remember the unconscionably senseless measures taken ostensibly to combat coronavirus? Then you know what this kind of pseudo-scientific conspiracy on the left looks like. But unlike masks and school closures, the “breast is best” shibboleth boasts adherents on the right as well.

For some conservatives, anything that smacks of minimizing or denying the differences between men and women — as baby formula does, by rendering dads equally capable of feeding babies — is prima facie verboten. On the religious right in particular, an idealized image of nurturing, self-sacrificing motherhood has become sacrosanct. No argument that might plausibly result in the further marginalization of traditional maternity from our broader cultural conception of a female life well lived is permitted. Not even if that argument — like that baby formula is equal to breast milk for nourishing babies — is factually correct.

In a moment when many claim there are in fact men who both breastfeed and menstruate, I share the conservative desire to return to a world in which “what is a woman?” has a self-evident answer. However, such a world would likely not be one in which each mother stays home to lovingly nourish her own children with her own body. Such a world is the stuff of anti-feminist fantasy. It never existed. In other words, so-called “trad wives” are anything but traditional.

In the agrarian society that composed all of human history until quite recently, all but the richest women worked, either on farms or in the homes of wealthier women. Including mothers. Meanwhile, there have always been women who either could not or did not wish to breastfeed. It was common for such women to have others nurse their babies; it was also common for babies to die of starvation in the absence of adequate nutrition.

The blessing of formula

If I lived in the 1700s and I were fortunate, a sister or a friend would have nursed my babies while I did her farm chores or watched her toddlers. Or, if I were very fortunate and had the means, I would have hired a wet nurse. If I were unfortunate — and many women were — my children would have perished in infancy.

God bless baby formula for reducing the ranks of the thus unspeakably unfortunate to nearly zero.

To curse such an unequivocal good instead because its use has coincided with (and, yes, can help to facilitate) feminist developments that sadly encourage women to eschew maternity more broadly is illogical, uncharitable, and counterproductive. Yet the mythology of breastfeeding’s synonymity with true womanhood is so useful as a vehicle for conservative identitarian posturing around maternity that it does not matter to some adherents whether it is true.

If conservatives’ goal is for more women to have more babies, they should defend the use of baby formula. If feminists’ goal is for women to be ever more liberated from the disproportionate costs of parenthood in comparison to men, they should do the same.

“Breast is best” is not best for anyone.