Maternity: Back to the Breast

“A pair of substantial mammary glands,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes the Elder in 1867, “has the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned professor’s brain in the art of compounding a nutritious fluid for infants.” Although eminently sound, Dr. Holmes’s medical opinion was ignored by three generations of American women striving for female emancipation. The breast’s function as fans et origo of a perfectly balanced natural diet was largely ignored. Now there are signs that highly educated and sophisticated American women are moving back to breast feeding as the best thing not only for their babies’ physical and mental health but for their own.

In the forefront of the back-to-the-breast movement is La Leche League International, founded in a Chicago suburb twelve years ago after two young mothers who wanted to nurse their babies ran into difficulties. Says Mrs. Clement Tompson, wife of a research engineer: “I had a different doctor for each of my first three children, and when I ran into difficulties with breast feeding, the doctors’ only answer was ‘Put the baby on the bottle.’ ” For Mrs. Gregory White, the problem had a more piquant quality. Her husband was a physician, but he could give her no help because he had been taught nothing in medical school about breast feeding. Marian Tompson and Mary White mastered the technique, and when they nursed their babies publicly at a fashionable North Side picnic, so many admiring young mothers gathered around that La Leche League-was born. By now, the league has 635 groups all over the world, with 620 in the U.S., and a total of 20,000 members. This week, with a handful of sympathetic doctors on hand, the league is holding its annual convention in Denver.

False Modesty. Despite its members’ zeal, the league does not proselyte in the usual sense. It offers advice and services only to women who seek them. For the most part, these are women who want to breast-feed because they think it is natural, and for them the league has published a 166-page book, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which in ten years has sold 150,000 copies. Less common but more dramatic are the cases of babies who are allergic to cow’s milk and all formulas but can not get human milk from their mothers. When such cases are reported, La Leche members volunteer their surplus milk. It is then frozen and shipped to the starveling. (The Junior League also runs a frozen-breast-milk service for babies in such emergencies.)

The enthusiasm of La Leche mothers is now receiving increased scientific support. A husband-wife team of physician and psychologist, Dr. Michael Newton and Dr. Niles Newton of Chicago, point out in the New England Journal of Medicine that the survival of the species originally depended upon “the satisfactions gained from the two voluntary acts of reproduction—coitus and breast feeding. These had to be sufficiently pleasurable to ensure their frequent occurrence.” There never has been any argument about the pleasure of coitus, but the satisfactions of lactation were submerged in the prudery and false modesty of the Edwardian era, and the later feminist drive to achieve equality with males by minimizing female functions.

The physiological responses in coitus and lactation are closely allied, say the Newtons: “Uterine contractions occur both during suckling and during sexual excitement. Nipple erection occurs during both. Breast stimulation alone can induce orgasm in some women. Nursing mothers not only report sexual stimulation from suckling but also, as a group, are more interested in as rapid a return to active intercourse with their husbands as possible.”

Less Cancer. La Leche mothers and their handbook put less emphasis on such basic drives than on the welfare of mother and child. Medical research firmly supports their contention that a breast-fed baby is less liable than a bottle-fed baby to such distressing complaints as diarrhea, colic, diaper rash, allergies and infections—from the common cold to influenza and poliomyelitis. He also benefits emotionally from frequent fondling and being cradled in Mother’s arms. The mother herself benefits because hormone changes associated with lactation speed contraction of the uterus after the stretching caused by childbirth. The incidence of breast cancer is far lower among women who have nursed their babies than among those who have relied on the bottle. And again, the nursing mother enjoys satisfactions denied a woman who has to mix and fix formulas.

Some of the conveniences of breast feeding are obvious. The milk is always at the right temperature, so there is no problem of heating bottles and worrying when they cool off. It is available at any hour of the day or night. It is always sterile—if there are stray germs around the nipples, they are almost certainly the ones to which the mother and therefore the baby already have antibodies.

More Flow. The inconveniences of breast feeding are just as obvious for the modern woman who wants to be active outside the home, at work or in her social life. She cannot rush home every time the baby needs to be nursed. Besides, most women nowadays are too embarrassed to nurse in public, although La Leche offers advice on how to do it modestly. If women overcome this hesitation, they still do not know how to start the milk flowing. Most obstetricians could not care less; their responsibility ends with the delivery. Most pediatricians have been inadequately trained. And nurses in lying-in wards are much more eager to put a bottle in the baby’s mouth to keep it quiet than to trundle the infant back and forth to Mother every two or three hours.

For La Leche’s scores of thousands of members, the routine is neither difficult nor unfamiliar. Their rule: let the baby suck to start the milk flow; the more it wants and sucks, the more plentiful the flow will be. There are exceptions, as there have been throughout history, when wet nurses have been in demand: some women simply cannot breastfeed. La Leche tries to reassure such women so that they will not feel guilty. There is no point in making a cult of breast feeding,*and La Leche advocates it only for those who both can and want to do it. La Leche mothers concede that for the vast majority of infants, formula does no harm. They simply contend, with old Dr. Holmes, that their own product is superior.

* It derives its name from a Spanish title for the Mother of Christ: Nuestra Senora de la Leche y Buen Parto (Our Lady of Milk and Good Delivery). * As did the young eager-beaver pediatrician, Sloan Crockett, in Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group. For his desperate wife Priss, “the most natural thing in the world” was “completely unnatural, strained, and false, like a posed photograph.”