I regularly read The Skeptical OB, and today’s post concerned breastfeeding stunts. Surprise: it’s not an Olympic sport. I had to look it up to confirm what my maybe squeamish eyes couldn’t believe: a woman, breastfeeding her own child, and attached to her other breast? Her friend’s son.
Now, my sister has twins, and breastfed both of them with the help of a specially designed pillow. The pillow is actually quite a clever invention, and although my husband and I don’t plan on having twins (“One at a time, please, darling.”), I think the pillow would be a good thing to use for a singleton baby in the event I choose to need it.
But I digress.
A Pennsylvania mom has ignited a national debate about breastfeeding after she shared a photo that shows her breastfeeding her 16-month-old son and her friend’s 18-month-old son at the same time.
Jessica Anne Colletti [right] posted the photo in a Facebook Group named “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” She shared her story Mama Bean – Unconditional Attachment with People Magazine.
Breastfeeding is a great option. Formula feeding is a great option. But do you really want to turn infant feeding into some kind of public display contest? Jessica Coletti seems to.
Like I said earlier, maybe I’m just squeamish. I get that. I don’t have kids yet, so there’s probably a whole universe of stuff that I can’t pretend to know about until I’ve had kids, got up with them in the night, rocked them for hours to try and get them to go back to sleep, suffered the agony of cracked and bleeding nipples…you get the picture.
But nursing a friend’s child? I don’t think I could do that, no matter how well-intentioned the gesture might be. What’s wrong with formula when you’re babysitting the kid?
I think I know where Colletti got the term “milk brothers”. She read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, which is a fictionalized autobiography of the Biblical character Dinah – daughter of the Old Testament patriarch Jacob. This isn’t the first time that book has been used as inspiration for NCB (natural childbirth) stuff, women’s retreats, and what have you.
It’s a very good read. It happens to be one of my favourite books. I was named after my paternal grandmother, Dena (just a different spelling of “Dinah”, pronounced the same way: “Dee-nah”), so the story in Diamant’s book has a special feeling for me. Dinah is no longer just a victim of rape, but has a whole history behind her. Diamant’s incarnation has it that Dinah was not raped, but that she married Shechem (“Shalem” in the book) willingly, and that they loved each other.
But one has to remember that it’s only fiction. Many concepts are explored in it, particularly ancient midwifery, the culture of ancient women, and how their society among Jacob’s family functioned as a mini-unit, symbolized by the “red tent”, a place where the women of the tribe would go each month when they were menstruating; women also labour and deliver their babies in the red tent. Unlike Jacob’s monotheism, they were polytheistic. There are descriptions of Rachel’s and Dinah’s calling to midwifery, the births they attend, and sometimes, the deaths of the mother or the baby. Deaths are romanticised, as being “the shadow of birth/new life”, and that every midwife “knows that death can lurk in the corner of the red tent”. Fine, for ancient times. But we know better than that now. Diamant was asked in a FAQ about some of the practices in the book, and although she researched them, she would never advocate actually practicing them in the 21st century. Example: the use of herbs for inducing a miscarriage. That would get you an attempted murder charge now.
Again, it’s a really enjoyable piece of fiction. It’s very popular in women’s book clubs, I hear. But it’s NOT a how-to midwifery manual!
I see many parallels with events in the book that have been co-opted by people like Colletti: “milk-sibling” is but one of them. (Dinah and Joseph, for example, are “milk siblings”).
A final thought: where are the dads or spouses in this decision-making process? As another user said in the comments to the Skeptical OB post:
The decision between two women that one nurses both children doesn’t even bother me. Well, I’d prefer the fathers were also involved in the decision and medical screenings were done. But that photo – pure exhibitionism. [emphasis mine]
