Historical, Cultural and Social Aspects of Breastfeeding
Interview with Antonia Anderson
I chat with Newborn Mothers educator Antonia Anderson from Peaceful Postnatal, who teaches two modules on Breastfeeding in our Postpartum Education and Care Professional training. Together we discuss the social, historical and cultural structures impacting women's ability to breastfeed. At the core of this conversation, we challenge the belief that women are responsible for their own breastfeeding success. Instead, we explore the social and systemic change required to support mothers' breastfeeding journey.
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About Antonia
Antonia is a Newborn Mothers educator, breastfeeding support specialist, mentor for postnatal doulas, teacher and resource creator. Antonia has a fierce commitment to improving postnatal support. She has spent hundreds of hours counselling mothers and helping them reach their breastfeeding goals through her business Peaceful Postnatal. Antonia now provides professionals working with mothers with the tools and skills they need to support breastfeeding.
We explore the following questions:
Where did your passion for breastfeeding support come from?
How has the rise of the dairy industry influenced formula production?
Why are formula companies trying to sabotage mothers’ natural breastfeeding connection?
Why and how did the dairy industry move into infant formula?
How has the rise of the sexualisation of breasts impacted breastfeeding?
How has feminine ownership of this knowledge shifted to masculine ownership?
What influence do social connections have on breastfeeding?
Alongside the benefits of breastfeeding for babies, what are the benefits of breastfeeding for mums?
What are the benefits of milk sharing? How do you respond to safety concerns?
What are your thoughts on people’s ‘choice’ to breastfeed or not?
Additional resources we spoke about:
Video: Breastfeeding Basics for Family and Supporters - https://www.newbornmothers.com/blog/breastfeeding-basics-for-family-and-supporters-video?rq=breastfeeding
Quote Clarity
I want to share with you a quote from Kasper Jakobsen, the president and CEO of Mead Johnson Nutrition, one of the world's biggest infant feeding companies. Whilst presenting at a conference, Kasper said:
"So, let me begin with the offset. We continue to see breastfeeding rates in the U.S. climb through 2014. Now we'll be watching very closely as we go through 2015 to see whether the improvement in unemployment trends will cause this trend to abate somewhat. It's our hope and expectation that that will be the case."
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello and welcome to Newborn Mothers Podcast. Today, I have with me a good friend and colleague, Antonia. Antonia and I created the Newborn Mothers Breastfeeding Course for Professionals together. [Update: Antonia is now one of the Newborn Mother educators and teaches two modules in the Postpartum Education and Care Professional training.]
I'll let Antonia introduce herself, but the reason we're having this podcast is when we were creating the course, we learned a ton. We did heaps of research and just found some really interesting things about breastfeeding, particularly when it comes to history, culture, and the social aspects of breastfeeding, as well as the biological aspects of breastfeeding, understanding those two things, is really important.
There was a lot we couldn't fit into the course, and so we wanted to just schedule this little chat to do a podcast together to add in a little bit of bonus content. If you like this podcast today, you will love the course. Antonia, over to you. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Where did your passion for breastfeeding support come from? (01:28)
Antonia Anderson:
Hi, Julia. I'll just introduce myself quickly. I was a postnatal doula for several years now. I live in Canberra, Australia with my partner and our two kids. Once COVID came along my life and the way that I work changed quite radically in the way that probably most of us did. I stopped working with clients face-to-face. I've been doing a lot more teaching and training and writing my own content.
It was, for me, a really nice shift because it gave me the chance to do things like creating the breastfeeding course with you and having more time to think about these concepts and how they affect not just the few mothers that I have the chance to work with in my small community, but mothers worldwide. So that's how I came to this and a little bit of what I've been doing for the past few years.
It was amazing creating the breastfeeding course with you because I learned so much that I had no idea that I didn't know. As you said, we just could not fit it all into the course. There was too much. Even just that one module that we have on the culture and history of breastfeeding, I feel like we could create three courses exploring those topics. I'm excited that we have the chance to chat a little bit more today about some of the things that we didn't fit in.
Julia Jones:
Yes, me too. I'm sure we could even do another podcast again because there's just so much to talk about. Just before we get stuck into that topic, I just also want to mention that Antonia was on the podcast way back in episode six. If anyone wants to go back to the beginning of Antonia's journey and hear where it all started, you can. It's been really a pleasure to see Antonia and so many of my graduates just really thriving, starting their businesses, and within just a few years really finding their feet, making good income and supporting a lot of mothers. Antonia's done a really amazing job of starting out from nothing. You were a stay-at-home mum before this, and it's been amazing to watch your trajectory.
Antonia Anderson:
It's so funny because I had no interest in babies or motherhood or supporting mothers before I had my own baby. It was a really unexpected career change for me. It was not something that I ever thought that I would get involved in. But once I had babies of my own and went through that experience of breastfeeding, the postpartum time and the support or lack of support, it really opened up this whole new interest for me. As a career, it opened a lot of doors meeting people and meeting professionals, working in areas that I hadn't even imagined existed. I'm so glad I came across you, Julia. I think I came across your recipe book first, and that was what led me into your other work.
Julia Jones:
I remember that. You were in a yoga class with someone who talks about my recipe book a lot. So that was very fortuitous because here we are now with this amazing course, which I couldn't have written on my own because I definitely don't feel like I have the skills in breastfeeding that you have to be able to pull this all together.
How has the rise of the dairy industry influenced formula production? (04:51)
One of the things that we really learned a lot about when we were looking at these more cultural, social, historical aspects of breastfeeding was the rise of the dairy industry and how that influenced formula production. Do you want to speak a little bit about that?
Antonia Anderson:
The relationship of the dairy industry to breastfeeding is it's almost invisible today because we don't talk about it very much, and most people aren't really aware of this whole iceberg underneath what we can see and our personal experience. If you think about it, even having a dairy industry is fairly modern in terms of our time here as humans on this planet earth. Agriculture has been around for 12,000 to 15,000 years, so that's 1% of our time on earth. So for all of these years, for 99% of our time, humans have survived without drinking cow's milk.
Then even once people in certain areas did start drinking cow's milk, goat's milk and other animal milks, it was quite a dangerous food because, of course, fresh milk is a breeding ground for bacteria. So it's not something you can just keep around in your cupboard. So for example, things like tuberculosis, up until the 1930s when pasteurization became more common, I think it was around 30% of tuberculosis deaths were caused by drinking milk. So it was not this necessary part of our diet.
Even today, it's not essential as a food, but it shows up on the food pyramid. People are taught that dairy products are an essential part of our diet. This isn't that something changed in our biology, it isn't that we evolved to need milk, it's that we were sold a story. It's a massive marketing story that has been going on for a couple of hundred years or a bit more now where we're sold this story that dairy is essential.
Julia Jones:
What you're saying about milk being, back in the old days, a very unsafe food, we would never have fed it to babies. Unless that baby was literally going to die, it's not something you'd ever choose
Antonia Anderson:
Unless you absolutely had to if you didn't have a wet nurse or a friend or a sister or a mother or a grandmother on hand, if you were very unusual in that situation that you couldn't access another breastfeeding woman, then you might feed your babys animal's milk. But if you were lucky, you owned a cow or a donkey or a goat, and you fed that baby sometimes straight from the teet or you would milk that cow and give the baby fresh milk. But if you weren't so lucky, you would have to buy cow's milk and it could be hours old, it could be days old, and so it was extremely dangerous. It wasn't something that people were choosing to do in the way that we're told that women choose not to breastfeed today, which is another part of the story that we're sold.
Julia Jones:
Let's just touch on that briefly before we keep going, but this idea that women choose to breastfeed or can't breastfeed or don't want to breastfeed. Today, I think one in three women meet their own breastfeeding goals, and I think, I hope I'm remembering this number, but only 16% of women are still breastfeeding at six months, exclusively breastfeeding at six months, which is very low, but we still have this idea that it's the mother's fault, that somehow she's made bad decisions or she didn't try hard enough, rather than thinking, "Hang on, if it's this common, maybe there's actually some social aspects to this story as well." So that's why it's really important to look at the influences of things like the dairy industry.
Antonia Anderson:
It is. Often, mothers do blame themselves, and if they're busy blaming themselves, then they can get stuck in that self blame, and it's much more effective if we can break out of that and get a little bit curious, "Well, why? Why didn't breastfeeding work out? It's not because I'm somehow fundamentally flawed. It's not because there's something wrong with my body." That just doesn't make sense. Humans didn't evolve to be so badly put together that breastfeeding would be a huge problem.
If a woman is unable to breastfeed, there is a social aspect to it, and it's not accidental. Oftentimes, it's deliberate. For example, hospitals who receive funding from companies that are associated with formula production, those hospitals might be deliberately designed so that the babies were kept in nurseries quite far away from the mothers. So straight away, they're breaking that connection between the mother and the baby. It's much, much harder to establish breastfeeding successfully if you have to wait 20 minutes for your baby to be brought to you.
Those designs were very, very deliberate. It's not happening because of a lack of understanding of breastfeeding in many cases. Formula companies and businesses that make profits off of artificial breast milk being sold to mothers do a ton of research about breast milk, about how it works, about how breastfeeding works, so that they can then sabotage those natural connections and provide the solution, which is formula.
Why are formula companies trying to sabotage mother’s natural breastfeeding connection? (11:00)
Julia Jones:
I remember that you mentioned in the course. Do you remember it off the top of your head that was the head of a formula company?
Antonia Anderson:
It was something like they were talking about how profits had been not as good as they had hoped the previous year, but in the year that they were going into there because of the economic downturn, they were seeing more women return to the workplace. So he said something like, "We hope and we wish that this will mean that more women will fail to breastfeed and will then turn-"
Julia Jones:
"... buy our product."
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, "... buy our product," and it was very clear. I wish I could remember the quote.
Julia Jones:
We'll maybe put it in the show notes.
Antonia Anderson:
It was so chilling to read, and there's a lot of those. That information is out there if you go and look at the transcripts from meetings, symposiums and conversations that people are having at these high levels in the dairy industry, in the formula industry, and they're very clear about talking about ways to sabotage those natural breastfeeding connections and the requirements that are in place for breastfeeding to be successful, and that's quite confronting. It's not nice to hear. I think sometimes it's easier for women to believe that their bodies were somehow at fault than that there's this whole system that is profit-based and the wellbeing of the mother and child is not a priority when compared to those profits.
Why and how did the dairy industry move into formula? (12:54)
Julia Jones:
I love the way you phrased it too, that they know how breastfeeding works. It's not a mistake that this is happening. They're deliberately researching and understanding breastfeeding so they can stop it from happening. Can you go back a little bit to the dairy industry and how that then became formula?
Antonia Anderson:
Around the early 1900s, a couple of things were at play. There was a mechanization of the dairy process like the process of milking cows and getting the product to market. Instead of doing everything by hand, you now have these machines doing a lot of the work, so they're ending up with a lot of excess products. We've got all this surplus.
Then around the time of the great depression in the USA, especially, what happened was that dairy farmers were being subsidized by the government, and then the government had to do something with all the excess milk. Those things, the mechanization and the economic downturn contributed to this phenomenon of all of a sudden having a lot of excess dairy milk.
So what do we do with all this cow's milk? We don't want to just throw it away. Well, let's make it the main ingredient in breast milk substitute because it's cheap and because it's plentiful I think people sometimes have this assumption that we use cow's milk because it's good for babies or because it is the closest thing to human breast milk, and that's not the case at all. It's just cheap and there's a lot of it.
If we really wanted to find a substance that was as close to human breast milk as possible, we would look to the primates. We would look to our evolutionary cousins. We wouldn't be out there going, "Oh, well, let's find this animal that eats grass and has multiple stomachs and hooves." It doesn't make any sense.
Julia Jones:
No, but people would be horrified at the thought of drinking orangutan milk or gorilla milk like that. People listening to this would be just like, "That is insane," but really, it's not any more insane than drinking cow's milk.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah. It's like when you go to a different country and you're served food that isn't typical for your country, you have this visceral revulsion like, "Oh, that's gross. I would never eat snakes or turtles or snails or monkey's brains," or whatever it is, and it's not. Things aren't fundamentally disgusting, it's just that we are culturally conditioned to have that ick factor or not have that ick factor.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, and we're culturally conditioned to think that cow's milk is a staple food for humans.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, and women are told that they have to be like cows, this image of a woman breastfeeding and being very placid and relaxed and gentle, but why? Why don't we tell women, "Well, you have to be like a tiger when you're breastfeeding. You have to be really fierce and predatory," or, "You have to be like a bat when you're breastfeeding. You have to hang upside down." All mammals breastfeed. We've really created this social story where women are cows.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, exactly, and even now, I know a lot of the breastfeeding research that we have is based on lactation in cows because we want to be able to promote cow's breast milk supplies. So a lot of the things that we learn about promoting milk supply in humans comes from the dairy industry as well, which is a little bit depressing.
Antonia Anderson:
It does, and we know so much more about cow's milk than we do about human's milk. It's really a mystery in many ways. I was reading some interesting articles about some of the research that's being done nowadays on breast milk, and there's just so much more to learn and understand, and there's so many areas that are just these great dark spaces of mystery. We have no idea how to even figure out what's going on there. I think it would be easy to look at that and go, "Well, we have no idea how breastfeeding works, so how can we say that it's better than anything else?" but we don't need to understand how breast milk works or all the components or have unpacked the DNA to know that it's the biological norm.
It's really upside down this idea that we have to prove the benefits of breast milk. We don't do that with any other body parts. We're not going around saying, "Oh, well, you could just wear a wig instead of grow your hair”. We should have to prove the benefits of having your natural hair or we should have to prove the benefits of having your natural ears instead of everyone having prosthetic ears fitted just as a regular thing. It's bizarre. We don't do that with other parts of our biology.
Julia Jones:
No. Birth is the only time, isn't it? Birth and breastfeeding.
Antonia Anderson:
That language was something that it's been influenced by the formula industry, by the dairy industry, by the soybean industry, which also has a huge vested interest in women continuing to buy formula. This language of breastfeeding has benefits rather than not breastfeeding carries risks. That was something that was debated, and unfortunately, we weren't able to make it normal to talk about the risks of not breastfeeding because that was considered too confronting, it might make women feel guilty, and it might put economic hardship on the dairy industry and other big business. This language was deliberately put into place.
Julia Jones:
I think something that's really interesting to take note of is all of the time that we are blaming individual mothers and setting mums up to have this individual fight, "I need to learn how to breastfeed. I need to overcome the odds, and it's my responsibility and it's my problem and it's my fault," and all of this kind of thing, it's turning us away from understanding this system so that we can actually change it forever for everyone, and that's where we really need to be putting our energy.
How has the rise of the sexualization of breasts impacted breastfeeding? (19:27)
Can you talk a little bit about, I'm curious because these two things happen in sync, and I don't know if they're really related, I've never thought about it before, but the sexualization of breasts seems to rise at around the same time as the dairy industry. Is that just me drawing those two things together?
Antonia Anderson:
I don't know. I think there's a lot of complex factors at play because, yeah, it did happen around the same time, and it may be a case of, well, which came first, the chicken or the egg because that was around the time that women were having to separate from their babies rather than taking their breastfeeding babies along with them to workplaces.
Julia Jones:
It's all just the patriarchy.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, it's all just the patriarchy, but yeah, breasts did become sexualized. Now, it's so ingrained, it's so much a part of our culture that it's hard for us to even believe that it's not just innately biological, but it is. There are many, many cultures where breasts don't have that connection with sex, probably less so these days because Western culture has spread to many corners of the globe. But in the 1950s when a couple of anthropologists were doing studies with hundreds of different cultures about the way that sex was perceived, they were really interested to find that there's a very small number of cultures at the time, I think it was three out of 90 something, that connected breasts with sexual arousal and sexual attraction. Even at that time that they were doing that study, cultures where physical appearance was not connected with sexual attraction. How's that for a mind-blowing concept? It's almost you think, "Well, what could it be related to if not physical appearance?" because it's everywhere in our society.
Breasts are not a primary sexual characteristic. They're a secondary sexual characteristic just like the Adam's apple for men or pubic hair or a deep voice, but we don't connect to those things with sex in the same thing that we do breasts. So we don't use tufts of pubic hair to sell cars. We don't have men cover up their Adam's apples when they leave the house because it would be sexually arousing for women on the street to see them walking around.
Julia Jones:
I love these examples that you're giving, Antonia. It helps people just really understand how absurd it is for us to think that breasts are inherently sexual because they weren't. People today, you can still find cultures that don't sexualize breasts. I know that when you travel to Bali these days, still, if you go to the villages, there are a lot of women who will walk around, the older women, not the younger women, but the older women who've been doing it for their whole lives, they just walk around with a sarong and no top on. That's how they've always just walked around their villages. You don't have to go very far to still find these things, but it becomes so ingrained, doesn't it? It's hard to imagine or remember that it could ever be another way.
Antonia Anderson:
It's had such a big effect on women's comfort and willingness to breastfeed because when you're making yourself sexually vulnerable, every time you do the normal act of feeding your baby, it becomes a lot more complex. I think this sexualization of breasts and of breastfeeding as well as an act has made it really difficult for women unnecessarily. It's created this barrier to women just feeding out and about and in their public spaces. Every time a woman breastfeeds in parliament or breastfeeds as part of her job, it makes headlines.
It has a massive impact, and that's a social thing. It's not a biological thing. It's not something that we've evolved for some good reason. It's just a cultural belief. If we waved our magic wand right now and we got rid of that cultural belief that breasts are inherently sexy, then overnight, we would see a huge increase in women successfully breastfeeding.
Julia Jones:
Yes, because I see it a lot even in women's homes because women have a lot of visitors when they have a baby, especially they might have their father-in-law visiting or something like that, they don't really feel that comfortable. When you're learning to breastfeed, you do just need to have your boobs out a lot, all the time, all day and all night. There just have to be boobs everywhere. It doesn't take much, even in a woman's home. You only need a few visitors or a trip to the supermarket, and suddenly it becomes much harder to learn how to breastfeed.
How has the greater patriarchal shift resulted in the feminine ownership of this knowledge shifting to the masculine ownership? (26:52)
All of this happens in sync with this greater patriarchal shift as well and it happened in birth too, this idea of the shift from the feminine ownership of this knowledge to the more masculine ownership of this knowledge, the shift from midwives to doctors, the way that women have been oppressed, and it's all happening at the same time. So it's a big picture, but can you talk a little bit about that aspect as well?
Antonia Anderson:
Again, I think it is one of those things that is like the iceberg beneath the water. People don't really think about how their experience of patriarchy is affecting their everyday decisions and their everyday experience.
I remember there's this story that Jennifer Grayson, who's an author of the book, Unlatched. It's a wonderful book that I used a lot in researching for the breastfeeding course. She went through this process where she was interviewing everyone that she knew about their breastfeeding experience. She went and actually interviewed her mother who had been breastfeeding I think it would've been like the early '70s. Her mother said that part of the reason why she didn't breastfeed is that her partner, her husband, so Jennifer Grayson's father, that he saw her breasts as sexual and that he felt really awkward about her breastfeeding because it was going to affect his access to her as a sexual partner.
I'm just laughing imagining how awkward this conversation would be to have with your mother, but she didn't stop there. She then went and interviewed her father and asked him, and he had a slightly different story. He did not remember ever saying anything about the sexual aspect. He didn't even remember expressing an opinion about her mother breastfeeding. He just said, "Oh, well, people didn't really breastfeed at that time, and it was a hippie thing to do," and in his memory, it was just what happened. He didn't see himself as having influenced her decision. But in the mother's experience, it was very clearly influenced by her husband's opinion. At that time, she said that she wanted to be a good wife, and that she felt subservient to him in that way.
Those social influences can be really subtle. It's not as obvious as someone being aggressive and saying, "No, you're forbidden to breastfeed. How dare you. Your breasts belong to me." It's not so cartoonish. It's just people having conversations, people letting their opinions show in a subtle way. You mentioned someone breastfeeding in front of their father-in-law. Just those subtle feelings of approval, disapproval or embarrassment are having an effect on people's decisions, and it's not always a conscious decision.
Julia Jones:
Yes, which is why we teach so strongly in the collective for professionals to really dissemble those emotions because newborn mothers, biologically, our brains are designed to respond to nonverbal cues more once we've had a baby. That's how our brain changes, one of the ways. As professionals, we do a lot of training and learning around not raising our eyebrows, not rolling our eyes, not tensing or holding our breath because all of those things, even if we don't intend it, even if we aren't aware of it, the mothers will still pick it up.
This is exactly what's happening in a broader cultural level as well, particularly if we've got a whole generation, our parents, who perhaps didn't breastfeed very much at all. So they've got all of these biases and even their own guilt or shame or disgust or whatever their emotional experiences were. It doesn't take much, does it, to put a mum off?
What influence do social connections have on breastfeeding? (30:26)
Antonia Anderson:
No, and you can't underestimate the value of those social connections for a woman, and that's one of the other things that's going on in a postpartum brain is that those social connections are even more important to her, and she's better at forming those connections. So how can you expect a woman to breastfeed when to do so would be going against everything that her social support system is telling her?
I worked with a client once who had made the decision not to breastfeed before her baby was born, and she volunteered the information. I didn't ask why because everyone's circumstances are individual. I never want women to feel that they're being pressured to breastfeed, but she volunteered the information that she was planning not to breastfeed because her mother and sister hadn't breastfed, and that is a really valid reason. We can't discount that and say, "Oh, women just need more education or they need more information," because it doesn't matter how much a mother or a expectant mother knows about the benefits of breastfeeding or the risks of artificial feeding. If to choose to breastfeed is going to affect her relationship with her mother or her sister or her mother-in-law, that's a really big ask.
We can't have this focus on educating women as if they're making this decision in a void. We need to be educating their social support system as well, and we need to be providing them with support, with true support, not just pressure saying, "You must breastfeed or else you've failed," or, "You haven't tried hard enough," because that's the story that they're often being told.
Julia Jones:
Absolutely, and on that note, I just want to let all of our listeners know that we have another free breastfeeding resource as well that we've put out as a bonus to this course, which is a video that Antonia's made on the website. It's on our blog. That is a video for support people. It's breastfeeding basics to show your village just what they need to know about breastfeeding in order to support you because it is ridiculous really to treat women as though they're breastfeeding in a vacuum. It's just not how it works.
Another topic we got really excited about and learned heaps about was milk sharing. We've talked a lot about this in the collective and throughout general postpartum discussions, the idea of alloparenting. Alloparenting, by extension, means allobreastfeeding. It means that we're not just parenting our own children, but we're parenting all of the children in our community and breastfeeding all of the children in our community.
I actually met an aboriginal woman, a Nunga woman, at a conference recently, and she breastfed her own children, she breastfed her sister's children, and she breastfed her grandchildren. When I was talking about alloparenting, she's just like, "Yeah, yeah, this is normal for us." There are still many people, many cultures that this is normal, but for us, this idea of milk sharing, again, it's a little bit like drinking orangutan milk. We have this revulsion towards it.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, massive ick factor and people go, "Oh, is that safe? Can't you catch diseases? Isn't it disgusting?" You may feel that way and your feelings are valid, but they're not science, they're not biology, and those feelings are created by the social structure that we're born into. So no, it's not particularly risky to have a baby who is being breastfed by a lot of different women. In fact, it confers additional immunity on that baby. It's also good for the women to breastfeed for longer periods throughout their lifespan.
Alongside the benefits of breastfeeding for babies, what are the benefits of breastfeeding for mums? (34:48)
Julia Jones:
Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute because we talk about the benefits of breastfeeding for babies a lot, but yeah, let's talk about the benefits of breastfeeding for moms. What does it mean when you breastfeed more children for longer?
Antonia Anderson:
Can I reframe that? What does it mean when you don't breastfeed? What does it mean when you limit your breastfeeding experience or when you don't breastfeed at all? If you don't breastfeed, or if you limit the time, it increases your risk of breast cancer, it increases risk of ovarian cancer, osteoporosis, hypertension, heart attacks. All these quite serious health conditions, the risk is increased when women are not breastfeeding or when their experience of breastfeeding is limited to a few weeks rather than the biological norm of at least a couple of years.
Of course, that has a cost, a financial cost as well. Billions of dollars could be saved if women were supported to breastfeed according to that normal biological standard. I just want to highlight that, again, women should not be blamed for this. Individual women should not feel like there's this burden of responsibility or that they've harmed their own health by not breastfeeding because it is not an in individual task. It's a social event. Breastfeeding is something that if women aren't given the support to do, then they haven't failed. It's a really insidious, horrible belief that women should be responsible for their own breastfeeding duration and success and all of that.
Julia Jones:
We should feel let down by our society, but not personally responsible. I'll also add to that, the way that statistics work, a lot of people get a bit scary if you hear, "I didn't breastfeed and that means my risk of cancer's increased." It doesn't mean that you're going to get cancer. It might mean that instead of a one in a hundred chance, it's a two in a hundred chance. You're still probably not going to get cancer.
Antonia Anderson:
It doesn't mean that individually your chances have increased. It's more looking at it across a population.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, so thousands of people. This is important at a government level, it's important at a policy and health promotion level. But as an individual, it's unlikely to affect you.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, that's right.
What are the benefits of milk sharing? How do you respond to safety concerns? (37:35)
Julia Jones:
Which is why it's so important we talk about these things at a big picture level. So sorry, back to milk sharing. We don't really do that now. It's very rare for someone to feed, in my culture, for someone to feed another baby directly from their breast. The way that milk sharing works these days tends to be people will pump milk and store it in their freezer or take it to a milk bank or give it to a friend. So what's the safety around that because that's, obviously, like we were talking about, how dangerous cows milk was? So what's different?
Antonia Anderson:
Well, in those terms, nothing's different in that you need to store the milk safely. You can't just leave it out. It does need to be refrigerated and frozen safely. Some women, when they're receiving donated breast milk, they like to just boil it quickly, so engage in a pasteurization process just as an extra layer of protection. As far as the milk itself, what the risk factors are, it's very, very, very low. There's never been a single reported case that I know of in the research that I've done where a baby was sickened through drinking donated breast milk.
There have been some cases through a milk bank, and I'll just quickly explain the difference because milk sharing and milk bank sound very much the same. When we're talking about milk banks, that is a formalized process. It's usually an organization that might be a charity or it might be run through the hospital. Mothers are still expected to donate the milk, but the milk is then either sold or it's given to the babies who are deemed to be at the most risk.
Often, it's quite hard for families to access the breast milk from a milk bank if they don't meet the criteria of that particular model. Formula companies also purchase breast milk from milk banks to use for their own research to try and break down the ingredients and mimic those or say that they've added ingredients to artificial breast milk that is in human milk.
With milk sharing then, typically when we're talking about milk sharing, we're talking about a person to person agreement, so this is not a regulated industry. This is a grassroots organization. The most popular one that people might have heard of is human milk for human babies, and they're on Facebook. You can find your local group by typing in human milk for human babies, and then the name of wherever you live and your group will pop up. How that works is that people who are looking for breast milk can just put out a request, and people who are nearby who want to donate breast milk would make that connection with them personally so they would meet or somehow get the milk to each other.
The onus then is really on the individuals to make sure that they're using common sense guidelines, that they're being hygienic, that they're asking questions like, "Are you a non-smoker and what sorts of things do you eat?" and anything that might influence their decision to accept breast milk from that other family.
Typically, you wouldn't pay. This is a purely neighbor to neighbor act of gift giving. There's no incentive for mothers who are donating milk through a milk sharing organization. They're not getting paid for it. There's no incentive for them to cut corners or to mix cow's milk with the human breast milk as has sometimes been found in milk banks where you pay for the milk because, obviously, as soon as you introduce profit into the equation, people are going to try and reduce the amount of effort that it takes to make the same amount of profit.
Julia Jones:
Yes, and I'll just point out that in Australia, we have laws preventing people from selling any bodily part, whether that's organs or milk or blood donations. It's against the law to pay for that. It's not the case in other parts of the world so depending where you live, you might need to just look into that.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, but it's interesting because if you think about it, if milk sharing were more common, and if we could get beyond just expressing milk and giving it to someone else and actually just feed the baby and cut out that whole middle step, it would solve a lot of breastfeeding challenges for mothers and for babies because imagine if every time you were struggling to breastfeed for some reason or you were a new parent and things just weren't going right, how much pressure would it lift off of your shoulders to be able to say to your friend, "Hey, can you just breastfeed my baby for me for a few hours while I rest my nipples and get a little bit of sleep and then come back to this with a clear head?" You wouldn't be worrying that your baby was going to starve. You wouldn't be thinking, "Oh, I'm a terrible mother because I can't feed my baby and the responsibility rests only on me." It would be a massive benefit to be able to have that peace of mind.
Then you could also practice breastfeeding with an experienced baby if you were a new mother and vice versa. A baby who was struggling to breastfeed, maybe it's a good idea to get a very experienced breastfeeding mother to have a go with that particular baby.
Julia Jones:
So you're now both learning at the same time.
Antonia Anderson:
You're now both learning. It's such an obvious solution, and yet because of the ick factor, it's unlikely to happen overnight. We can't just say to thousands of Australian women, "Oh, just let your friends breastfeed your babies," or, "Oh, you're breastfeeding a baby. Why don't you offer to feed everyone's baby next time you go to the playground with your toddler? Why don't you just offer your breasts to the random lady sitting next to you on the bench?" It's a huge cultural shift. It's not something that can happen overnight, but if it did, it would eradicate the need for artificial breast milk and it would solve all those problems. It would reduce the billions of dollars that are spent on healthcare that's needed because of not breastfeeding.
Julia Jones:
Yes, it would reduce a lot of barriers to milk sharing as well because a lot of women can't express a lot of milk, even if they can make a lot of milk for the baby that when you pump, it just doesn't work as well. It's not as efficient.
Antonia Anderson:
Or it's a lot of work too.
Julia Jones:
You have to clean everything.
Antonia Anderson:
Imagine if you could just say, "Oh, look, I don't have time to express for you, but why don't you just let me have your newborn for a couple of hours?"
Julia Jones:
Absolutely. Yes, that would be so much easier and cheaper. Plus, you wouldn't have the barriers of storing the milk and making sure it's kept at the right temperature and it's not too old and all of that kind of thing.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, it's such a great example of a situation in which science and logic say one thing, but culture and society say another thing.
Julia Jones:
Have undermined it.
Antonia Anderson:
They just go, "Ah, it's disgusting."
Julia Jones:
To the point where people don't even realize now. I've heard other women saying, "Thank God for formula. My baby would've died if formula hadn't been invented," and I'm like, "No, they wouldn't. You would've just had your sister feed your baby or something. Yeah, I'm sure it would've been fine."
Antonia Anderson:
I've heard also people who work in childcare and have to handle expressed breast milk, they're asked to follow certain hygiene guidelines, so wearing latex gloves or washing their hands. I've had conversations with people who believed that that was because the breast milk was somehow infectious or they would catch something from it, and of course it's not. It's because we don't want for people to be touching it with dirty hands.
Julia Jones:
Because we're protecting the breast milk.
Antonia Anderson:
We're protecting the breast milk from the people, not the other way around, but because people are so used to thinking of blood, for example, as something that you just don't touch because you could get an infection, they put breast milk in the same category. It's just another belief which people probably don't even think about consciously, but really determines the way that we act about breastfeeding.
Julia Jones:
Yes, and a lot of people don't realize just how breasts filter the milk very well. For example, if you drink during pregnancy, we all know that can be very harmful to the baby, but in fact, if you drink alcohol when you're breastfeeding, very little of that alcohol actually gets into the milk by comparison to blood. Your boobs do a really, really good job of filtering out all sorts of things, and the milk that your baby gets is very, very clean.
Antonia Anderson:
Yeah, and even a tiny amount of alcohol that does make it to your baby's brain is less harmful than artificial breast milk, than formula. Even if you do get really drunk one night and you're breastfeeding your baby, it's not ideal, but the risk factor is much lower.
Julia Jones:
So again, we've just way overemphasized the risks of breast milk. We've oversexualized breasts. We've separated mums from their babies. We think that breastfeeding is disgusting, and yet we still blame mothers when they don't manage to do it.
I think we've covered everything I wanted to ask you about. Was there anything that we missed?
What are your thoughts on people’s ‘choice’ to breastfeed or not? (48:16)
Antonia Anderson:
We have covered a lot. I think I just want to end with saying that women don't choose to breastfeed or not breastfeed in the same way that they choose to paint their nursery walls green or yellow or pink or blue, yet it's often framed as a choice. I think that's really dangerous because it's not a personal choice. When women are saying that the reason they couldn't breastfeed was because they had to go back to work three weeks after their baby was born or they weren't allowed to take breaks during work to feed their baby or that their partner didn't want them to breastfeed because it would affect their sexual relationship or because they felt embarrassed feeding their baby in public, those are not choices on the same level as, "Do I prefer green or yellow?" Those are social structures that are impacting that woman's ability to make an informed choice and to make choices that are beneficial.
Julia Jones:
Even to make the choice that she wants to make, even a lot of women will try really hard to breastfeed and still not be able to because there's just too many barriers in their way, even when they do make the choice to breastfeed. I think that's really important to keep in mind. For people listening, if you didn't breastfeed, know that there's a lot more, that there's a lot more underneath that iceberg than we can easily understand at a glance.
Thank you so much, Antonia. If people want to learn more, you can find out more at newbornmothers.com. We have the breastfeeding course for professionals, which is recognized by the Australian College of Midwives. [Update: The breastfeeding course has been replaced with the Postpartum Education and Care Professional training.] We cover obviously a lot of the biological aspects of breastfeeding, but also we do cover a lot of the social, emotional, evolutionary, biological. It's a very comprehensive course, and we wanted to make sure we looked at it from all those different angles. Thank you for sharing, and we'll see you next time.
Antonia Anderson:
See you next time, Julia. Thanks so much. This has been really, really fun to chat about all this stuff.
Julia Jones:
Thank you. Bye.
Antonia Anderson:
Bye.
