Php 70.00 Vol. 47 No. 07 • July 2013 - IMPACT Magazine Online!

ARTICLES
Breastfeeding
and feminist
frustration
FILE PHOTO
By Nicole M. King
Public health officials continue to
encourage new mothers to breastfeed
their babies for at least six months
because of the short- and long-term health
benefits to both mothers and children. Yet
adversarial feminists continue to whine
that the responsibilities of motherhood,
particularly exercised by mothers who
choose to do what is best for their children,
generate gender “inequality.”
Indeed, in their study of 1,300 firsttime
mothers, Phyllis Rippeyoung of
Acadia University and Mary Noonan of
the University of Iowa lament that breastfeeding
constricts mothers’ employment
opportunities. Compared to mothers who
use baby formula or who breastfeed for
less than six months, “long-duration breastfeeders,”
they found, “are more likely to
be non-employed in the years following
childbirth and they work fewer hours when
they are employed.” They further complain
that breastfeeding hinders “women’s full
participation in public life.”
These musings aside, the researchers’
findings are revealing. Examining data
from the National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth, Rippeyoung and Noonan quantify
“the conflict between breastfeeding and
[paid] work.” So they measure the relationship
between three types of infant nursing
(formula feeders; short-term breastfeeders;
and long-term breastfeeders) and employment
outcomes in the five years after birth.
They confine their sample to mothers who
gave birth to their first child between 1980
and 1993, while excluding teen mothers as
well as mothers who were not employed
for at least twenty-four weeks prior to
giving birth.
Not surprisingly, average earnings
for all three types of mothers declined in
the year of giving birth, yet the percentage
drop in earnings “is most extreme for
long-term breastfeeders and more modest
(and similar) for short-duration breastfeeders
and formula-feeders.” Earnings stop
declining, on average, once the child is two
years old, “but remain much lower postbirth
through the fifth year post-birth.” Yet
among long-term breastfeeders, “earnings
drop more precipitously in the year after
they have a baby and their post-birth earnings
trajectory remains lower than for the
other two groups of mothers.” Moreover,
at this stage, the long-term breastfeeders
are significantly more likely to have given
birth to additional children than the other
two categories of mothers.
These real-world findings frustrate
Rippeyoung and Noonan, who seem
unwilling to accept the reality that childrearing
responsibilities—especially with
babies, toddlers, and preschoolers—do
not easily mix with outside employment
for the average mother, and never will.
They do concede the possibility that the
very act of breastfeeding may direct a
mother’s affection towards family life
and away from outside employment. But
they nonetheless think that if federal law
protected rights of mothers to breastfeed
at the job site, mothers would more
quickly reenter the labor force after giving
birth—as if that is what most mothers
want to do, not what feminist researchers
want them to do.
Given how marriage, childbearing,
and breastfeeding more strongly correlate
with the well-being of women and children
than does outside employment, perhaps
the researchers ought to reconsider their
imaginary world and instead call for “social
and economic supports” that would ensure
a husband for every mother, and married
father for every child, resolving disparities
that really matter. I
(This article is republished with permission
from MercatorNet)
20 IMPACT • July 2013