I saw her article from a very different perspective. While she does say she'd be happy to see pumps disappear entirely, I read that as hyperbole. What she seemed to really be arguing against was the way feeding breastmilk has been prioritized above having mothers spend time with their babies. The problem is not the breastfeeding - it's with the way mothers are guilted into pumping at the office, after they go back to work.
When I became a parent, I breastfed. I supplemented a bit when there were problems that took a while to solve, but I breastfed. It was a huge shock to me when I started hanging out in Mommy forums and realized that there were women in North America who had to go back to work when their babies were only a few weeks old. You see, I live in Canada, where I could access Unemployment Insurance for a maternity leave that lasted until my babies were ten months old. So the idea of a pump in a workplace was totally foreign to me. I've never, ever seen a woman pump at work in Canada. Not once. They don't need to, because they're home with their babies during those first crucial months.
I think getting pumps out of the office/workplace would be a fabulous thing, if it were done by making sure that every woman who wanted to give breastmilk to her baby was at home for those first six months to a year. And on that level, I think this article was right on track: it's absurd to think that pumping at the office is a reasonable substitute for being home and nursing your baby. It's not. It's not even close.
Pumping in situations where baby is having trouble eating for whatever reason is not in the same category. I can see how her imagery would be offensive to someone in your position, but she's not really talking about someone in your position. She's talking about the mothers who go back to work at eight weeks and leave their perfectly-healthy babies with a sitter, and have to take an hour and a half of extra breaks to pump food for their babies during the day.
Pumping should be an interim measure until breastfeeding can be well-established or baby's health stabilized enough to allow for normal breastfeeding, or a stop-gap measure so Mom can get out of the house for a few hours without baby. It should not be the way caregivers get milk for healthy infants of working mothers - because healthy infants of working mothers deserve to have their mothers at home with them.
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I saw her article from a very different perspective. While she does say she'd be happy to see pumps disappear entirely, I read that as hyperbole. What she seemed to really be arguing against was the way feeding breastmilk has been prioritized above having mothers spend time with their babies. The problem is not the breastfeeding - it's with the way mothers are guilted into pumping at the office, after they go back to work.
When I became a parent, I breastfed. I supplemented a bit when there were problems that took a while to solve, but I breastfed. It was a huge shock to me when I started hanging out in Mommy forums and realized that there were women in North America who had to go back to work when their babies were only a few weeks old. You see, I live in Canada, where I could access Unemployment Insurance for a maternity leave that lasted until my babies were ten months old. So the idea of a pump in a workplace was totally foreign to me. I've never, ever seen a woman pump at work in Canada. Not once. They don't need to, because they're home with their babies during those first crucial months.
I think getting pumps out of the office/workplace would be a fabulous thing, if it were done by making sure that every woman who wanted to give breastmilk to her baby was at home for those first six months to a year. And on that level, I think this article was right on track: it's absurd to think that pumping at the office is a reasonable substitute for being home and nursing your baby. It's not. It's not even close.
Pumping in situations where baby is having trouble eating for whatever reason is not in the same category. I can see how her imagery would be offensive to someone in your position, but she's not really talking about someone in your position. She's talking about the mothers who go back to work at eight weeks and leave their perfectly-healthy babies with a sitter, and have to take an hour and a half of extra breaks to pump food for their babies during the day.
Pumping should be an interim measure until breastfeeding can be well-established or baby's health stabilized enough to allow for normal breastfeeding, or a stop-gap measure so Mom can get out of the house for a few hours without baby. It should not be the way caregivers get milk for healthy infants of working mothers - because healthy infants of working mothers deserve to have their mothers at home with them.