Whether you breastfeed, bottle feed, or tube feed, whether you use breastmilk, 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 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.
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. I talk a lot about infant feeding and related issues on Twitter. Follow me on f_woollard