I follow a lot of parenting pages and blogs. Most of them are natural parenting type
pages, and nearly all of them espouse breastfeeding, which I am all for. I breastfed my first child for a few months,
but I didn’t have any support, i.e. someone to show me what to do, how to do
it, the pitfalls and how to avoid them, etc., so we only made it for two
months, and then I pumped for another month.
Some of the bloggers I follow get a little bitchy about BFing, though. It’s clear to me that breast is best—it
provides the best of the best nutritionally and bumps up immunity. It has lasting benefits. But I also think if a woman can’t or even
just doesn’t want to breastfeed, we should all shut the eff up. As long as the baby is being fed, we should
back off. Still, if I have another baby
I’ll (probably) definitely give it another whirl.
I added
the qualifier after reading Florence Williams’ book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural
History. Williams, who received her
MFA through the illustrious MFA program at the University of Montana, breastfed
her children. “I was happily nursing my
second child, blithely backstroking through that magic bubble known as the
mother-infant pair-bond, when I stumbled upon a news report…I read that
scientists were finding industrial chemicals in the tissues of land and marine
mammals as well as in human breast milk.”
Being a journalist mama, she wrote about it, sending off her breast milk
to Germany to be tested for flame-retardants, which hang out and build up in
our fat, and have been shown to cause all kinds of problems in lab animals. Her breast milk tested positive, higher than
she expected, and 10 to 100 times higher than women in Europe. Williams’ milk also tested positive for a jet
fuel ingredient, among other chemicals and exposures that come from
electronics, furniture, and food. And that
got her wondering about the ecosystem that is the human breast. “What toxic load had I already bequeathed my
children by nursing them? What did it
mean to their health, and to mine? Was it still okay to breast feed? How did these chemicals interfere with our
bodies? Could we ever make our milk pure
again?” Breasts store fat, so they also
store fat-loving chemicals. They’re
permeable, reflective of everything we eat, drink, touch.
The
book made me a little uncomfortable, which I take as a good sign. Williams is a chatty writer, so she makes the
scientific stuff understandable. In
parts it was a bit much for me, but not so much that I didn’t want to keep
reading every second. I particularly
love the way she started the book off.
She took care to mention a theory of breast evolution—basically, it goes
like this: Men like big breasts, and
find them useful. Big-chested women were
chosen for mating, the big boob gene got passed down, and well, there you have
it, that’s why most men prefer a large dairy section. Large breasts are a better indicator of age,
the theory goes, so our ancestor males knew that once the boobs started
sagging, either with age or after pregnancies, the males would look elsewhere
for a mate.
And
then, to my delight, she pretty much pshaws that whole theory, pointing to
glaring holes: Frances Mascia-Lees, an
anthropologist Williams spoke with, thinks the last fifty years of study about
breasts and attraction has been a bunch of bull. If men had so much to do with breast
evolution, if they prefer women with large and firm breasts, why would our
boobs be at their largest and firmest while pregnant and breast feeding? Why is there so much breast size variation,
and why are smaller-boobed women just as good at nursing and parenting in
general? “Just suppose for a moment,
gentlemen of the academy, that breasts evolved because she needed them, not because her club-wielding cave man did.” Ha! I
love it.
But
that was all in the first few pages.
Now. Basically, we know nothing
about breasts. What causes breast
cancer, what REALLY causes it? Young
breast feeding mothers get less of it, older breast-feeders like me, a little
higher. The only thing that has been
actually, without a doubt proven to cause breast cancer is radiation. And the most commonly recommended screening
tool? Radiation, in the form of
mammography. Williams goes into a lot of
things that I’m not going to do justice to, but I found this review that
touches beautifully on some of the science.
What this book did for me, though, was make me more aware that I need to
be more aware. It’s exhausting, all the
steps we have to take to get away from plastic, for example. Carcinogens are found on the back of shiny
receipt paper, for crap’s sake. It’s
incredibly depressing, but we’re on a need-to-know basis. And it turns out we really do need to
know.
No comments:
Post a Comment