Surviving the Workday

Oh, how I wish I were not intimately familiar with a breast pump! 

A few weeks ago, The Atlantic published The Case Against Breastfeeding, an article by Hanna Rosin. Possibly nothing has brought me greater joy in the past six months than reading that article. Rosin doesn’t suggest breastfeeding is bad, but she does suggest that the sacrifices that have to be made along the way can be extreme and that the evidence in favor of breastfeeding is substantially less overwhelmingly positive than you might think (and have been told over and over). Furthermore, and ultimately, it seems to me, breastfeeding in the U.S. is an issue about class. Some women have time and space to pump at work or have paid time off to nurse or earn enough to save money to pay for their own time off—these women are more likely to be in white-collar jobs.

Rosin’s description of the difficulties of breastfeeding with (paid) work is brilliant:

The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing. [Ed note: I added italics because I love those two sentences.]

That brings us to the subject of pumping. Explain to your employer that while you’re away from your baby, “you will need to take breaks throughout the day to pump your milk,” suggest the materials from the awareness campaign. Demand a “clean, quiet place” to pump, and a place to store the milk. A clean, quiet place. So peaceful, so spa-like. Leave aside the preposterousness of this advice if you are, say, a waitress or a bus driver. Say you are a newspaper reporter, like I used to be, and deadline is approaching. Your choices are (a) leave your story to go down to the dingy nurse’s office and relieve yourself; or (b) grow increasingly panicked and sweaty as your body continues on its merry, milk-factory way, even though the plant shouldn’t be operating today and the pump is about to explode. And then one day, the inevitable will happen. You will be talking to a male colleague and saying to yourself, “Don’t think of the baby. Please don’t think of the baby.” And then the pump will explode, and the stigmata will spread down your shirt as you rush into the ladies’ room.

And don’t I love the religious imagery in the last sentence of that quote! Yes, pumping at work is not necessarily easy. And Judith Warner in Ban the Breast Pump agrees that this ritual of pumping milk (particularly at work) can become absurd. She raises the following questions:

Why, as a society, have we privileged the magic elixir of maternal milk over actual maternal contact, denying the vast, vast majority of mothers the kind of extended maternity leave that would make them physically present for their babies?

Why do we keep sticking our heads in the sand, putting all the burdens of our half-changed society on women – their “choices,” their “priorities,” their bodies – instead of figuring out reasonable ways to make our new family lives work?

Indeed. We’ve chosen the milk over the mother as if they are somehow not related. If the American Academy of Pediatrics wants to recommend exclusively breastfeeding for six months, if they truly think this is best, they need to lobby hard for paid maternity (and paternity) leave. The current situation in which women pump at work is untenable.