Bottled Up

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Suzanne Barston. Bottled Up

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Bottled Up

How the Way We Feed Babies Has Come to Define Motherhood, and Why It Shouldn’t

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By appealing to mothers’ propensity to guilt and fear, the PSA assumed a few things: first, that the target audience was committed to a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby; second, that they were committed to the nutrition of their children; and third, that they were committed to being the best parents possible. So we’re starting with a group of women who are already nervous, probably overloaded with information (my living room was a veritable obstacle course of pregnancy and parenting books), and the host of a ton of pesky hormones that make us cry at something as innocuous as a rerun of Saved by the Bell. The campaign’s creators were well aware of the impact these ads would have; one member of the AAP’s breastfeeding committee claimed the campaign signified “a change to promote breast-feeding as a public health issue rather than simply as a personal parenting choice.”17 Even the slogan used in the campaign—“Babies are born to be breastfed,” rather than the well-known adage “breast is best”—was significant. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) intended the slogan to address its growing concern that breastfeeding should not be seen as the “ideal,” but rather that formula should be framed as risky.18

Even if one were to accept the general premise that babies were, indeed, sprung from the womb with a breastmilk birthright, where was the mother in the scenario presented by this slogan? Rebecca Kukla, professor of philosophy and internal medicine at the University of South Florida, voiced these concerns in a 2006 paper examining the campaign. Rather than addressing the real reasons women don’t breastfeed—reasons that range from histories of sexual abuse and body image issues to economic and physical constraints—the campaign “portrays anything short of exclusive breastfeeding … as a sign of moral corruption and bad character. … We can only conclude that DHHS believes that women can choose to breastfeed yet are failing to do so, not because there are any impediments to their voluntarily making this choice, but rather because they simply aren’t willing to do the best thing for their babies unless more pressure is exerted.”19

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