Philosophy and Feeding Babies

Whether you breastfeed/chestfeed, bottle feed, or tube feed, whether you use your own milk, donor human milk, formula or a combination, the chances are you have experienced:  

- judgment or requirements to justify how you feed your
- guilt or shame surrounding how you feed your baby
- lack of support 

I argue that there are a lot of philosophical mistakes surrounding the way we talk and think about infant feeding decisions (and motherhood/ parenthood more generally).  I think that if we could clear up these mistakes then we could get rid of a lot of the guilt, shame and judgment surrounding how we feed our babies - and make it easier to argue for better support.

I worked with the NCT and the BFN to make Feeling Good About How We Feed Our Babies a website that sets out to help parents and family members, health professionals and others who provide support with feeding to have better conversations about how we feed our babies.  This project was funded by a grant from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account at Southampton University.

We also made this short animated video.

I also helped Alberta Health Services develop their inclusive breastfeeding policy and 20-hour breastfeeding training course for health professionals.

You can view my accredited training lecture for Lactation Consultants for Gold Lactation here. 

My work formed the basis of a 4* impact case study for REF2021.  (This also provides a nice summary of how my work has helped parents, health professionals, and infant feeding support volunteers.)

I am now working on inclusive language and practice around infant feeding, as part of the project Caring for Everyone: Developing Inclusive Language and Practice in Perinatal Care

Here are links to some of my writing on infant feeding aimed at a general audience:

- Celebrating Breastfeeding Without Shaming Those Using Formula
- Changing the Conversation, NCT Perspective Piece with Heather Trickey and Dawn Leeming
- Combatting Guilt and Shame Project
​- Breastfeeding Dilemma Virtual Workshop
​- Breastfeeding and Natural Goodness
​-Interview at Imperfect Cognitions
​-Interview for BBC Radio 3 Art and Ideas programme, New Thinking: Pregnancy Puzzles. 
- Blog for JME "Harms of Formula" vs "Benefits of Breastfeeding": Why we don't "know" how to talk about the effects of different ways of feeding babies
​-"Philosophy can explain what kind of achievement it is to give birth" Aeon article - also talks about achievement and infant feeding.

If you want to delve a bit deeper, you can read some of my academic papers:
-"Requirements to Justify Breastfeeding in Public: A philosophical analysis" is open access in the International Breastfeeding Journal and can be found here
-“Do Mothers of Extremely Preterm Babies Have a Duty to Express Breastmilk?” Acta Paediatr. The open access author's accepted copy can be found here: doi:10.1111/apa.15323
- "Should we talk about the ‘benefits’ of breastfeeding? The significance of the default in representations of infant feeding" can be found here
 -"Breastfeeding and Defeasible Duties to Benefit", co-authored with Lindsey Porter in the Journal of Medical Ethics can be found  here.   If you don't have access to the JME, an author's copy can be downloaded here.