GateGirlTalk13: 3rd News Flash: Whose G-word?

http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/20/in-the-battle-over-breast-or-bottle-guilt-may-play-a-role/

Do you remember Elizabeth Rourke? The internist in How childbirth went industrial, by Atul Gawande, who had Cesarean section to deliver her baby in the thirty-ninth hour of labor. Despite her great efforts she put in her pregnancy, including bearing her child for one more week after her due date, and in her lengthy labor: she had endured the painful contractions for thirty-eight hours first and finally gave up and turned to C-section, Rourke did not think highly of herself but felt guilty and made herself miserable for a week. Because she used epidural, which she tried to avoid, during the labor, gave birth to her child under a C-section, which she also wanted to avoid, and failed to breast-feed her child after the labor. (1) Actually, women are made to feel guilty on the motherhood issues according to various reasons. We are first made to feel guilty if we do not want to bear children. Then the G-word comes again and again if we did not read to our children during the supposedly best antenatal training time, if we failed to pick the best schools for them, or if we failed to feed them with the best food suggested by the pediatricians. But the G-word effects mostly on the topic of breastfeeding or no. (2)

At present, a team of Australian researchers turn their eyes on the issue of the G-word and want to find out whether this word helps or hurts women’s participation in breastfeeding since these researchers have already noticed that those women who do not feed their children with their own boosts often undergo a lengthy period feeling guilty. Nowadays, women are made to feel guilty because, with the years of “Brest Is Best” campaign, many women are acknowledged of the benefits that both babies and moms can gain from breast feeding;breast-fed babies aren't as likely to fall prey to obesity, ear infections or diabetes; breast-feeding moms benefit from a decreased risk of breast and ovarian cancer (4). And women are advised to breastfeed their children for at least 12 months. However, the breastfeeding rates is far lower than the rates which are recommended by American Academy of Pediatrics or by the World Health Organization that less than half of the women keep breastfeeding their children at 6 months. "Governments and breastfeeding advocates across the globe have tended to focus on a campaign of fear and guilt to push women to breastfeed” says lead researcher Joy Parkinson, of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Miriam Labbok, director of the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, doubts if the guilty worked because the rates of breastfeeding did not increase in the past several years. And the most important question is: are women the right ones that should be charged to bear the G-word? Mothers “are feeling guilty not because we make them feel guilty but because they made the decision to breastfeed then can't get the support they need”, says Labbok.

While the U.S government pushes women to breastfeed their children, it does not take necessary actions to support women to do it. The Uniter States is one of the only 6 countries that does not command paid maternity leave (The others are Australia, new Zealand, Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea) (5). Because the time that working mothers need to pay for breastfeeding would definitely affect their careers and because they do not have paid maternity leave, mothers have no choice but to choose bottle-feed their children which make themselves feel guilty, otherwise they must endure failure on their careers and decrease of wages. But mothers are surely not the one to blame for not breastfeeding their children. It is the U.S government that tells these mothers that breastfeeding is better to the health of their children but the U.S government does not necessarily provide them with the support to do so. The situation for single mothers is even harder. They have no husbands to support them during times when they had to leave their jobs, they have a lot of problems in hunting a new job after giving birth, and they do not have people to share their stress in caring their children. Thus, choosing to breastfeed is too much for these single mothers to afford.

Women incline to bottle-feed their children also because they can hardly gain enough help and encouragement from their husbands on breastfeeding. A QUT study of nearly 1,400 U.S. and Australian women has found that breastfeeding help and encouragement from friends and family, especially dad, is more important than advice or support from health professionals. In the QUT study, 88% of women got strong support from their partners while just 31% received help from a professional. (2) However, as the U.S does not mandate paid maternity leave for women, the U.S does not command paid leave for fathers. But breastfeeding is not just a motherhood issue as the QUT study has proved and providing paid leave for fathers can not only release mothers’ stress on breastfeeding but also avoid keeping “men in a role subsidiary to that of women in relation to the exercise of their parental duties” (3). Actually, recently, Europe's highest court has ruled that Spanish dads are entitled to “breast-feeding leave.” Because, said the European Union Court of Justice in Luxembourg, extending the breastfeeding benefits only to women is “unjustified discrimination on grounds of sex” to men (3). So, nowadays, both Spanish moms and dads can leave work for an hour or cut their workday 30 minutes short for the first nine months of a baby's life (3). This ruling also provides Spanish employees with more precious time to spend with their children. In fact, even though the ruling is approved in the name of “breastfeeding leave”, the Europe’s highest court has commanded it to be considered as “time purely devoted to the child” (3).

Breastfeeding is just one, may be one of the not so tough ones, of the tough problems that make moms and dads stressed in raising children. In fact, choosing to have children usually also means choosing to lose a huge amount of possible wages. Working mothers earn to much less than working childless women; by 1991, thirty-year-old American childless women were making 90 percent of men’s wages, while comparable mothers were making only 70 percent of men’s wages. And mothers who switch to part-time jobs in order to have more time to care their children often earn less than other employees even though their workloads are the same. Because many employers suspect these mothers who work part-time jobs have “recreational” attitude towards work. The mammy tax that American women need to pay can be as huge as a million dollars; an economist has calculated that a couple who earn a combined $815,000 per year will lose $1.35 million if they have a child. (5)

While the breastfeeding rate in the U.S is decreasing, that rate is increasing in France, which is one of the two countries that have the lowest mammy tax in the world. French government spends more that twice the percentage of its GDP on social welfare. French women can enjoy a year-long paid maternity leave, so it is easier for them to breastfeed their children. Every French mother enjoys free health care and receives a cash allowance for each of her children. Single mothers do not need to face these problems they may face in the U.S. They can receive a package of benefits, including housing subsidies. Moreover, life can be much easier for these single mothers because the government can even pay for hiring a licensed nanny, so the G-word does not bother them if they want to work outside home. And the universal medical care, the free public nursery school, and the free preschool systems, make their lives much easier than that of American mothers. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the wage difference in France between working mothers and childless workers is only 8 to 10 percent, the child poverty rate in France is much lower than that in the U.S which is 17 percent, and the breastfeeding rate in France in increasing.(5)

“The definition of mother in this country is guilt,” says Labbok (2). But it is the welfare system in this country that should be blamed for failing in providing mothers in this country a good environment to raise their children in better ways. And U.S mommies, please do not let the G-word bother you!