History Fix

Ep. 113 Infant Feeding: How Breastfeeding Has Been a Challenge and a Controversy Throughout Time

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 113

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This episode is all about the history of feeding babies which has been necessary and yet surprisingly difficult since the beginning of mankind. In fact, it's so necessary that to forgo it, up until very recently, the last hundred years or so, was a death sentence for the infant. We don’t often think about feeding babies. It’s something mothers take care of behind the scenes, part of the invisible load. We certainly don’t pause to think about the history of it, the immense challenges faced throughout the ages. But we should. As necessary as infant feeding is, as necessary as it has always been, society still does not make it easy for mothers to pull off. And that should concern you, even if you aren’t a mother, even if you aren’t a baby. Because you were once, and so was I, and so was literally everyone. Let’s fix that. 

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Since the beginning of mankind, mothers have breastfed their babies. It is as natural and as necessary as any other bodily function - a heart beating, oxygen filling the lungs, blinking of the eyes. In fact, it is so necessary that to forgo it, up until very recently, the last hundred years or so, was a death sentence for the infant. We don’t often think about feeding babies. It’s something mothers take care of behind the scenes, part of the invisible load. We certainly don’t pause to think about the history of it, the immense challenges faced throughout the ages, what to do if a mother dies in childbirth? How will the baby eat? What if a mother is unable to breastfeed? How will the baby eat? When and where is it socially acceptable for a mother to breastfeed her baby? What if she has to work long hours in the fields or in a factory? How will the baby eat? Because until not all that long ago, there was no formula and bottles, vessels for feeding babies inefficient substitute milk? They were bacteria ridden death traps. We don’t often think about it. But we should. As necessary as infant feeding is, as necessary as it has always been, society still does not make it easy for mothers to pull off. And that should concern you, even if you aren’t a mother, even if you aren’t a baby. Because you were once, and so was I, and so was literally everyone. Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers and mother figures of the world! Finally a holiday that makes sense because my goodness mothers deserve to be recognized. Mothers carry the weight of the world on their shoulders and so much of what they do goes unseen and unrecognized. I won’t go as far as to say unappreciated but it is hard to appreciate things you don’t realize are happening. So, in this episode, I’d like to bring one major major thing mothers do out into the light and that is feeding babies without which literally none of us would be alive. Humans would cease to exist. And I’d like to dedicate this episode to my sister Hannah. OG History Fix listeners have heard Hannah’s voice before, she’s popped into a couple episodes in the past. Hannah is currently mothering a  fresh babe, Ms. Heidi Brooke, who is, well I guess she’ll be a month and a half by the time this episode drops, in addition to her two older children. So shout out to Hannah in the trenches and all the other moms in the trenches right now. You’re doing the dang thing, one feeding at a time. As I said in the opening, feeding babies, despite being one of the most natural and innate things, is not easy, has never been easy and some of that is nature and some of that is nurture but before we get into it, real quick, I released a mini fix last Wednesday on the heels of my Adolf Hitler two part release about the Hitler family that is fascinating, multiple jaw drop moments. Here’s a quick quick preview 


“After digging into the story of Adolf Hitler over the past two weeks, I found myself wanting to know more about his family tree. It seemed really twisted and strange and scandalous and confusing. There’s a lot of confusion about who the biological patriarch of the Hitler family was, Hitler’s biological grandfather. But aside from that, there’s multiple affairs and incest and suicides and possibly at least one murder. I wanted to know more about what happened between Hitler and Geli Raubal, his 23 year old half niece and lover who was found dead in his apartment with his gun next to her body. I was intrigued by the way he seemed to follow in his father’s footsteps, falling in love with his half niece in the same way his father had done. Was Hitler’s mother Klara really his father’s niece too? What was the connection there? And of course I was curious if there were any Hitler descendants left today. Who are they and how do they cope with having a monster in the family? Let’s fix that.”


You can listen to that full mini fix episode over on patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. It’s just $5 a month to subscribe or you can purchase the one episode for $3. Super worth it. You’re not only getting more content, you’re also supporting an independent podcast and literally helping to make History Fix possible. I am a one woman show you guys, I do it all, and if you find value in it, I hope you’ll consider supporting it. 


Okay, let’s talk about infant feeding. I was planning to call this episode breastfeeding because that really is the main focus here but there’s more to it than that. Ultimately, what it comes down to is there’s three ways to feed an infant. The mother can breastfeed, another woman, called a wet nurse, can breastfeed, or you can attempt to feed the baby some sort of breastmilk substitute using some sort of container the baby can hopefully drink from. We’re going to talk about each of these and, as you will see, they have each come in and out of style throughout the centuries, millennia really. Because there have always been a lot of opinions about how mothers should be feeding their babies for some reason, a lot of them coming from men. 


We know, we can infer, that since the beginning of humans, mothers breastfed their babies. And we can infer this because we wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. It was the only way to keep a baby alive. The first documentation of breastfeeding comes from ancient Egypt around 3,000 BC which is 5,000ish years ago but of course it was done near universally before that as well we can assume with confidence. The first documentation of the use of a wet nurse, a woman who is not the mother breastfeeding a baby, comes from around 2,000 BC in Israel. But I think it’s also safe to assume that this was done since the times of early humans as well. If something happens to the mother, she dies in childbirth or, for whatever reason, she is unable to breastfeed her own infant, there are two choices. Let the baby die or get this other lady who recently had a baby and is currently lactating to feed your baby too. Which would you choose? So wet nurses emerged initially out of necessity. Later as we will see, they began to be used as an alternative choice to feeding your child due to lifestyle but we’ll get into that soon. At first, most wet nurses were employed because the mother had either died or she was suffering from lactation failure. According to the Journal of Perinatal Education quote “Lactation failure is mentioned in the earliest medical encyclopedia, The Papyrus Ebers, which came from Egypt (1550 BC) and contains a small pediatric section that includes a prescription for lactation failure, as follows: quote ‘To get a supply of milk in a woman's breast for suckling a child: Warm the bones of a sword fish in oil and rub her back with it. Or: Let the woman sit cross-legged and eat fragrant bread of soused durra, while rubbing the parts with the poppy plant.’ The prescription demonstrates that lactation failure was a problem during ancient Egyptian times and, as such, wet nursing was the primary alternative-feeding method,” end quote. A sword fish eh? Jot that down mamas. My own grandmother swore by dark beer for milk production but then again she was unable to breastfeed her eight children and instead fed them canned evaporated milk, or so I’ve been told. We’ll come back to that later too. It’s actually a thing. 


By 950 BC in ancient Greece we start to see high status women choosing to employ wet nurses rather than breastfeed their own babies so it’s not out of necessity, it’s a choice. In ancient Rome, which I’m coming more and more to realize is way overrated and overglorified, they were freaking savages back there. From ancient Rome we have contracts that have survived, wet nurse contracts. These were lactating women, usually enslaved lactating women who were contracted to feed babies that had been abandoned. These were usually females, girl babies that had been thrown into rubbish piles. Yes, this was how ancient Rome viewed females, unfortunately. They were literally trash. And you may be thinking, oh good someone saved them from the rubbish piles and found a wet nurse to feed them, there were decent ancient Romans after all. No. Sorry to burst your bubble. But the reason they were taking the baby girls out of the trash and feeding them is because they wanted them as a quote “inexpensive slave for future use” according to the Journal of Perinatal Education which, by the way, I referenced super hard for this episode. It’s linked in the description. These contracts included detailed accounts of the wet nursing services including duration which was usually up to 3 years, clothing supplies, lamp oil, and payment. 


And, you know, they probably weren’t too concerned about who was feeding these trash babies but when an upper class family required or chose to employ a wet nurse for their own babies, they were quite selective about it. And so we have all this writing coming out from 100 AD to around 400 AD, the later years of ancient Rome, we have these men writing the qualifications for a wet nurse. Soranus of Ephesus, who I know I’ve talked about before but I can’t remember when, he compiled a 23 chapter treatise, an obstetrical and gynecological treatise and it talked about infant feeding. It says that, if you’re going to use a wet nurse, you have to make sure the milk is good quality. And it describes a fingernail test for determining the quality of the milk. Emily Stevens, Thelma Patrick, and Rita Pickler describe this test in the Journal of Perinatal Education writing quote “When a drop of breastmilk was placed on a fingernail and the finger moved, the milk was not supposed to be so watery that it ran all over the surface of the nail. When the fingernail was turned downward, the milk was not to be thick enough to cling to the nail. The consistency of the milk should range between the two extremes. Soranus’ criterion was used for the next 1,500 years to determine breastmilk quality,” end quote. 1,500 years. That’s all we’re going by. Galen of Pergamus who lived a little after Soranus wrote advising wet nurses on how to soothe infants through swaddling, movement, rocking, and singing lullabies. Cute. And Oribasius, a physician who came at the tail end of the Roman empire wrote that wet nurses should be healthy 25 to 35 year old women who had recently given birth to a male child. Specifically male, just for literally no reason at all. 


And then the Roman empire collapses of course soon after Oribasius wrote that and we have the middle ages. Wet nurses were still very much a thing during the middle ages, mostly out of necessity because there was a lot of death in childbirth, bit of a backslide in medical advancement and technology, lots of disease, and so mothers are dying left and right and wet nurses are needed to keep their babies alive. In the 1200s a Fransciscan Friar named Bartholomeus Anglicus wrote quote “A nurse rejoices with a boy when it rejoices and weeps with him when he weeps, just like a mother. She picks him up when he falls, gives the little one milk when he cries, kisses him as he lies, holds him tight and gathers him up when he sprawls, washes and cleans the little one when he makes a mess of himself,” end quote. Similar to Galen of Pergamus back in ancient Rome writing that a wet nurse should sooth and rock the baby and sing it lullabies. We can see that wet nurses did a whole lot more than just feed babies. They were a mother figure, a substitute mother. But this actually became problematic in the middle ages. Stevens, Patrick, and Pickler write quote “During the Middle Ages, society regarded childhood as a special time of fragility and vulnerability. Breastmilk was deemed to possess magical qualities, and it was believed that breastmilk could transmit both physical and psychological characteristics of the wet nurse. The belief resulted in protests against the hiring of women for wet nursing and, once again, a mother nursing her own child was valued as a saintly duty,” end quote. And so while wealthy Greek and Roman women were hiring wet nurses by choice, because they didn’t want to alter their lifestyle after having a baby, they wanted to sleep at night, they wanted to socialize and go about their business without having to stop and feed and take care of this baby constantly, by the middle ages and even into the renaissance we see a shift away from using a wet nurse by choice. It once again becomes a last resort to be used only out of necessity. We see this in The Treatise on Children published in 1577 which stated that the mother was better than a wet nurse unless she was ill or unable to breastfeed. The author, an Italian guy named Omnibonus Ferrarious worried that the infant would quote “savour of the nature of the person by whom they are suckled,” end quote and come to love the wet nurse, bond with the wet nurse more than their own mother. Which, you know, there’s something to that for sure. 


In the 1600s, a French obstetrician named Jacques Guillemeau wrote a book called “The Nursing of Children” with an 8 page preface that included 4 objections to using a wet nurse. Number 1, he says, the child may be switched with another put in its place. Okay. I mean yeah I guess that’s possible but like, why? This seems slightly paranoid and like unlikely to be point number one but whatever. Number two, the affection felt between the child and the mother will diminish. Valid. That’s the same point Ferrarious was making. Number three, a bad condition may be inherited by the child. Like the wet nurse is going to pass on some illness or disability or something. And number four, the nurse may transmit an imperfection of her own body to the child that could then be transmitted to the parents, which kind of seems like the same thing as number three. He does say to do it of course, use a wet nurse, if you have to, if it’s a last resort. And then he says, but don’t choose a wet nurse with red hair because red heads were known to have a hot temperament and that was harmful to their breastmilk. Lost me there. Isn’t it interesting how all of this is being written by men who couldn’t breastfeed a baby if they wanted to and have no idea what they’re talking about? I find that so interesting. When I say women didn’t write things down I mean they really did not write things down. Even when they were the sole experts on the topic. And so it’s no wonder they are lacking so completely from the historical record. They existed. They lived lives and accomplished incredible things. We just don’t get to know about it. 


But despite these warnings that start appearing in the Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance period, it appears wealthy women continued to hire wet nurses by choice. And, you know, can you blame them? They have these lavish lives. They go to balls and to the theater. They host banquets and garden parties. They play cards. Breastfeeding was considered unfashionable within the circles of wealthy women and they worried it would ruin their figures. God forbid. It also prevented them from wearing the socially accepted clothing of the era. Good luck breast feeding in those tight corsets and don’t you dare get any milk on that chantilly lace gown. Stevens, Patrick, and Pickler write quote “The wives of merchants, lawyers, and doctors also did not breastfeed because it was less expensive to employ a wet nurse than it was to hire a woman to run their husband's business or take care of the household in their place,” end quote. These women didn’t technically work. They weren’t employed, per say, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a job to do in running the household and keeping the affairs in order. It’s very very hard to do both and if you have to hire someone to do one of them and the wet nurse is cheaper, eh, kind of makes sense. 


In countries with slavery, like in the Americas, we see the use of enslaved women as wet nurses. Just like we saw in ancient Rome. Actually the use of enslaved African American women in the United States as wet nurses for white babies has had consequences for Black mothers even today. According to Stephanie Devane-Johnson, a certified nurse-midwife writing for NC Health News, she often found when she asked her patients that Black women were much less likely to consider breastfeeding. According to the article quote “National data show that only about 59 percent of Black women breast-feed, compared to 79 percent of whites and 80 percent of Hispanic women,” end quote. So Devane-Johnson attempted to figure out why. As part of her research for a doctoral degree at UNC Chapel Hill, my alma mater, woot woot, she held focus groups to ask Black women about breastfeeding. For many of them, and these were Black women ages 18 to 89 years old, for many of them breastfeeding was considered taboo. It wasn’t something they talked about or considered doing. It was considered a white thing. Devane-Johnson says quote “There were some older Black women who wanted to disassociate themselves from the past, from slavery and the wet-nursing.” One woman in her focus group said quote “That image of a ‘mammy’ when people would say that. It did conjure up those pictures of the women feeding the white babies and all that,” end quote. Devane-Johnson elaborates quote “A lot of slave babies died during slavery because they weren’t breast-fed. They were fed concoctions of dirty water and cow's milk. [Meanwhile, those children’s mothers were giving white children their milk.]... These pictures are all on social media. Then someone gets pregnant and people talk about breast-feeding. They’ll say, ‘You don’t have to do that anymore,’” end quote. Trauma is generational. It does not just go away. The horrors of the past affect us to this day and that is why they can’t be ignored. 


Then we see a shift happen in the 18th and 19th centuries, the industrial revolution. Stevens, Patrick, and Pickler write quote “the practice of wet nursing shifted away from wealthy families to laboring, lower-income families. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, entire families relocated from rural to more urban areas. The increased cost of living and poor wages forced many women to seek employment and contribute financially to their family, which made it virtually impossible for many mothers to breastfeed and attend to their children. Consequently, many of these children were farmed out to destitute peasant women,” end quote. So we see these super poor peasant women becoming wet nurses out of desperation, to make money. But of course to be a wet nurse, to breastfeed a baby, you have to have recently given birth yourself. And so what we have here is poor women having babies to induce lactation and then getting rid of their own baby so they can be a wet nurse to earn money. Jacqueline H. Wolf, professor of the history of medicine at Ohio University says in a Time Magazine article by Lily Rothman quote “Wet nurses were usually single women who’d been abandoned by their families or the father of their children, and you could see their desperation — mainly because if they went to work for a private family, that private family would almost never allow them to bring [their own] baby with them, so the baby had to be relegated to a foundling home. Really, what it meant was that a wealthy baby lived and a poor baby died. That was the history of wet nursing in the U.S,” end quote. 


So really a tragic situation overall. But we see the rise of the wet nurse especially during the industrial revolution and we see working class women employing them as well, not just wealthy women. And that’s because they had gone to work long hours in factories and it had just become impossible to feed and care of their children. This is a societal problem that we created. And when there is a problem, capitalism seeks to provide the solution, at a price of course. If you’ve ever breastfeed a baby, you know it’s a very on demand thing. You feed the baby when the baby is hungry. And it can be super frustrating because you just fed him like twenty minutes ago and now he’s hungry again? And there’s really no set schedule. We try to set a schedule, these feeding windows or whatever but that’s just not how it was designed to work. Babies are supposed to eat whenever babies want to eat and it’s this beautifully efficient natural system because the more the baby eats, the more milk the mother makes. And when you start restricting it and trying to schedule it, the milk supply drops. And so that’s what happened when all these mothers started having stricter schedules during the industrial revolution. Professor Wolf says quote “People were starting to work in factories and they had to pay more attention to time. We see the introduction in infant-care manuals of very detailed feeding schedules. The theory was that adults were having a hard time with scheduling, but if you can adapt a baby to scheduling, they wouldn’t have that tough time. The reason that’s really interesting is that anyone who knows anything about how breastfeeding works knows that the more a baby sucks, that’s what stimulates milk production. If you put a baby on a strict schedule, mothers’ milk supplies go down. So you see mothers beginning to complain that they didn’t have enough milk and it was then that the medicalization began, because doctors became involved in what seemed to be a very serious problem of lactation failure. No one connected it to the change in culture and the change in infant feeding habits. The doctors came up with all these theories. One of them was that [lactation] was simply a disappearing function. There was a large group of doctors who feared that when girls were in school during the time they were going through puberty, their reproductive systems were competing with their brains for energy, and their brains were winning — the over-education of girls,” end quote. Barf barf barf. Such a theory a 19th century man would come up with. Oh I’m sorry you have the mental capacity of a sand fiddler and can’t multi-task to save your life. Believe it or not, women can learn and maintain basic bodily functions at the same time. Crazy right? And so no one connected all this widespread lactation failure to mothers just not having the time to feed their babies when they needed to because of being overworked and having to stick to a strict work schedule. 


And so then what happens? Capitalism happens. And they start to try to manufacture and sell a solution to this problem that we created. They start trying to come up with a breast milk substitute that could be fed to babies. And this isn’t new really. There’s evidence since ancient times that we’ve tried to pull this off. We have evidence in the form of feeding vessels, early baby bottles essentially that were used to try to feed babies animal milk - whatever animal milk was available - cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse, whatever. I almost said chicken. Chickens don’t have milk. The earliest of these comes from around 2000 BC and they were found in the graves of newborn infants. And that right there tells you how effective they were. At first, they were thought to be containers used for filling oil lamps until chemical analysis revealed casein in them which is the protein in animal milk. So they had milk in them at one point and they’re in a grave with a baby skeleton. Put two and two together. Stevens, Patrick, and Pickler describe all of these early feeding vessels writing quote “Many different devices were used to feed animal's milk to infants. Some of the devices found were made from wood, ceramics, and cows' horns. In fact, a perforated cow's horn was the most common type of feeding bottle during the Middle Ages. By the 1700s, many infant-feeding devices were made from pewter and silver. The pewter bubby-pot was among these devices. Invented in 1770 by Hugh Smith, a physician at the Middlesex Hospital in London, the bubby-pot was similar to a small coffeepot with the exception of the neck arising from the bottom of the pot. The end of the spout formed a knob in the shape of a small heart, with three to four small holes punched into it. A small rag was tied over the holes for the infant to play with and suck milk through. During the same era, rags, small pieces of linen cloth, and sponges were often used as a teat or nipple. Another feeding device used from the 16th to 18th centuries in Europe was a pap boat. The device was used to feed infants pap and panada. Pap consisted of bread soaked in water or milk, and panada consisted of cereals cooked in broth. Both substances were used as a supplement to animal's milk, especially when the infant showed a failure to thrive. The pap boat included a spoon with a hollow stem so that the pap or panada could be blown down the infant's throat,” end quote. So they’re trying. They are really trying to come up with something that can be fed to babies besides breast milk and some way to feed it to them other than a breast. But for the most part, it does not work. The milk is inferior, number one, doesn’t have what the baby needs, too hard to digest, meant for a completely different animal altogether. But the main problem is actually the vessel, the container, the bottle. All of them were too difficult to clean and they quickly festered with harmful bacteria. And this was before we understood germ theory. This is before we knew about bacterial infections. And so many of these babies would die of a bacterial infection before they died of malnutrition. According to Stevens, Patrick and Pickler quote “In the early 19th century, the use of dirty feeding devices, combined with the lack of proper milk storage and sterilization, led to the death of one third of all artificially fed infants during their first year of life,” end quote. And that’s why wet nurses were more commonly used at that time. 


But now we have more and more women, working women, suffering from what’s being deemed lactation failure at around the same time that new innovations are coming on the scene. In 1810, a technique was developed by a French guy named Nicholas Appert to sterilize food in airtight sealed containers. And soon after, in 1835, another guy, William Newton, patented canned evaporated milk. Sweetened condensed milk followed soon after. And these were super helpful because, at the time, it wasn’t just the bacteria infected baby bottles that made alternative feeding dangerous, it was also very likely that the milk itself had gone bad. If you didn’t have a cow or you didn’t live near a cow you did not have fresh milk. There were no refrigerators. People didn’t even have ice boxes with literal blocks of ice to keep food cold until the late 1800s. So if you work in a factory in New York City and someone else has to feed your baby a bottle. What are they going to feed them? This is why the wet nurse prevailed for so long. But now, now we have this canned milk that doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Now they didn’t invent it for babies, of course. Men like Nicholas Appert and William Newton aren’t even thinking about babies and the plight of the women who feed them. No way. Canned milk really came on the scene because of the Civil War. Forget the babies, we have to feed the soldiers. That’s where the priorities have always lied of course. Like, y’all realize the babies are the future soldiers right? Okay. Just checking. 


But the mother’s catch on and so they start feeding babies evaporated milk and even sweetened condensed milk. And the bottles improve dramatically. Stevens, Patrick, and Pickler write quote “During the mid-19th century, great strides were made in the development of the feeding bottle and the nipple. Glass bottles were used, and the evolution of the modern bottle began. The first feeding bottles, created in 1851 in France, were elaborate. They contained a cork nipple and ivory pins at air inlets to regulate flow. However, during this time in France, it was still more popular to spoon-feed the infant or have the child suckle directly from an animal's teat. [Wow.] In 1896, a simpler, open-ended, boat-shaped bottle was developed in England, became popular, and was sold well into the 1950s. Teats or nipples introduced in the 19th century were originally made from leather and were preferred over the use of devices made from cork. In 1845, the first Indian rubber nipple was introduced. Although the first rubber nipples had a repulsive odor and taste, they were refined and adapted by the beginning of the 20th century. With the invention of the modern feeding bottle and nipple, the availability of animal's milk, and the change in society's acceptance of wet nursing, artificial feeding became a popular choice. As a result, medicine began to focus on infant nutrition from an alternative milk source,” end quote. 


So the canned milk was technically for the soldiers but now that we have bottles that sort of work, they start trying to produce milk specifically for babies. In 1865 a chemist named Justus von Liebig developed one of the first infant formulas which was cow's milk, wheat and malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate, first in liquid form and later as a powder which would keep even longer. After that a bunch of companies caught on and started developing and marketing infant formula. By 1883 there were 27 different patented brands. But problems continued. The formula was fattening but lacked most essential nutrients that babies need. There were also a lot of babies dying still, especially in warm weather months, due to the formula being left in the bottles, spoiling, and then being given back to the babies. Still no real concept of germ theory so they just have no idea. By the early 1900s we’d finally figured out about bacteria, an easier to clean rubber nipple was developed, and a lot of houses started having ice boxes to store milk in so it wouldn’t spoil and so formula finally became less deadly. By the 1940s and 1950s, post World War II era, formula had all but taken over and breastfeeding had fallen out of fashion. According to the CDC, around 70% of babies born in the 1920s and 1930s were breastfed but that fell to only around 25% by the 1950s. And that was due to the emergence and marketing of formulas. You can’t monetize breastmilk. It’s free. But you can sell the heck out of baby formula even at steep prices. Especially if you convince people that it’s even better than breastmilk. Which you better believe they tried to do. 


By the 1970s a movement began to try to bring back breastfeeding. We see the emergence of organizations trying to bring awareness to mothers to let them know how much better breastfeeding is for their babies and for them. Because we also, for the first time ever, started to study the effects of breastfeeding on the mother’s postpartum health and it’s significant. Breastfeeding reduces the chances of postpartum depression, aids in postpartum weight loss, reduces the risk of breast and ovarian cancer, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and osteoporosis. And we also know that breastmilk is better for babies. Formula has all of the same essential nutrients in it at this point but it’s always the same. It doesn’t change, doesn’t adapt to the needs of the baby like breastmilk does. This is crazy y’all but nipples like receive information from a baby’s saliva and then the milk changes to be exactly what the baby needs. The fat level, vitamin and mineral levels, antibodies to fight illnesses and infections, these change as needed based on input from the baby’s saliva. How crazy is that? I think people in the Middle Ages, believe it or not, were on to something. That’s the era when they believed breastmilk possessed magical qualities. That’s like real life magic right there. In contrast, we now know that formula fed babies are much more likely to develop atopy which includes eczema, asthma, and allergic reactions to food, as well as diabetes, and childhood obesity. 


Now, I’m not hating on formula feeding, please don’t take this that way. You gotta do what you gotta do. All I’m saying is that it’s a known scientific fact that breastfeeding has more health benefits for both the mother and the baby. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. It even says it on the formula containers. It says that breastmilk is better. The companies have to put that on there. But, as we know at this point in the episode, sometimes breastfeeding your baby is not the best option and thank the Lord that formula is now a safe and effective alternative because up until around 120 years ago, to not breastfeed was basically a death sentence. So, that being said, if you formula fed your baby, bravo. You’re a good mom. If you breastfed your baby, bravo. You’re a good mom too. And that’s where that argument needs to stay. It’s all about alive babies. Because too many of them have already died. End of discussion. And, honestly, enough input from men. I think we’ve had enough of that. 


So there was a re-emergence of breastfeeding in the later part of the 20th century thanks to the work of advocacy groups but that drops considerably as we come into the 21st century down to around 45% of women breastfeeding. And that’s worrisome because we know about the health benefits and they are significant. But the thing is, our society is not designed with breastfeeding mothers in mind. That 55% that chooses to formula feed, I have a sinking feeling a lot of them don’t really have a choice. Every mother wants to do what’s best for their baby. It’s biological instinct. But, as I mentioned earlier when talking about the onset of the industrial revolution and these women going to work long hours and having these set schedules. Breastfeeding doesn’t really work like that. It’s very much an on demand thing. Your tight feeding schedule isn’t going to work. Your milk supply is going to drop such that you can’t produce enough to adequately feed your baby. Now you might dispute that and say, oh well here’s what you do, you just take a nice long maternity leave, at least, you know, six months at least, and then you’re able to breastfeed on demand when your baby is small and they’re wanting to eat all the time, those cluster feeds. And then, when you go back to work, it’s no problem because you can just pump. You pump say every couple hours, 3 times during a shift at least of course and then you have a freezer stash of milk that your caretaker can feed the baby while you're working. It’s totally doable. But I would add, it’s totally doable for a select few working women in ideal circumstances. For the majority, this is not the reality. In the US especially, I can’t speak for Europe and other first world countries. I think they have it way more figured out over there. But the US is the only first world country in the world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave. None. Zero weeks. Zero days. None. And so what that means is that a lot of mothers are financially forced to return to work immediately after having a baby, I mean we’re talking a couple of weeks. Breastfeeding is not going to work for them. You’d be pumping all day long which isn’t possible at work, that’s the other problem. 


Even for women who can manage a halfway decent maternity leave, once they return to work, many of them are not given appropriate time or a place to pump. In 2010 the Fair Labor Standards Act required some employers to provide some employees with time to pump and a private location, not a bathroom, until their baby was a year old. It did not require them to pay the mother for this time, though. It also excluded a lot of workers: agricultural workers, nurses, teachers, truck and taxi drivers, home care workers, and managers. They were excluded from the 2010 act. And I’m like, are you kidding me? Nurses, teachers, and home care workers? You mean all the predominantly female jobs? Who is writing these laws? Oh yeah, men. But, thankfully, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 as in 2 years ago, finally included these workers as well. 


So, I just want to talk about my experience for a sec because I think it’s quite telling. When I had my first baby back in 2019, I was a teacher. I was a National Board Certified teacher with a 4 year college degree and I taught for the State of North Carolina. Not tooting my own horn, just saying I had like a legit career, not a very well paid one but a career nonetheless. No paid maternity leave. Not one single day. I had to use up all my sick leave and personal days (which I had to pay $50 per day for for the sub or whatever) and then I took unpaid leave in order to stretch my maternity leave to 6 months. Because that was important to me. I was going to make it happen even if it meant scraping by financially and we were lucky enough to be able to pull that off. No paid maternity leave as a teacher in North Carolina. Now they have it as of July of 2023, NC teachers now get 8 weeks paid maternity leave, finally, thank you. But when I was teaching it was precisely zero weeks. Also, when I returned to work, pumping was almost impossible and also not guaranteed for teachers until 2023. So I had about a 15 minute window in the middle of the day when my students went out for recess with another teacher. That was literally it. That’s also when I ate lunch, used the bathroom, and checked my email. I’m not exaggerating you guys, that’s how time poor an elementary school teacher is. And it wasn’t enough at all and I watched as my milk supply dropped and dropped and I watched as our freezer stash diminished and formula was not an option. Not because I was like “ew, formula,” but because I tried it twice and my baby became violently ill both times, like he turned gray and vomited profusely for hours his little body wracked with convulsions until he was throwing up neon yellow bile. It was horrific and super traumatic as a new mom and after the second time I was like “never again.” But then I couldn’t pump enough milk to replenish the freezer stash and it dwindled and dwindled and we didn’t know what we were going to do. And that was 100% because I was not provided adequate time to pump at work and that’s messed up. When you have to choose between working or feeding your baby. That’s messed up. And none of the men who make these laws will ever understand what that like and that’s why we need more women in government but anyway, I’m spiraling. What saved us, what actually saved us that year was Covid. March of 2020 we went to remote teaching and I was able to work from home and finally feed my child. 


It shouldn’t be so hard to feed your child. But in our society, it is. They make it hard and they make it hard because the ones making it aren’t doing it. They aren’t feeding babies and they don’t understand the needs of those who are. Can’t possibly understand. And don’t even get me started on the road blocks to breastfeeding in public. Are you even kidding me? Did you guys know that Utah and Idaho did not legalize breastfeeding in public until 2018. Umm, what? And it’s so infuriating that it’s the men a lot of the time the men who wrote these treatises right, these books, these male physicians saying “don’t use a wet nurse, your baby will like her better than you. A mother should breastfeed her own child. If you do use a wet nurse make sure she doesn’t have red hair. Rub a sword fish bone on her back. Breastfeeding is a saintly motherly duty. Shame on you for not breastfeeding. Formula is bad. Breast is best,” and then he goes “um, can you please not do that here? It makes me uncomfortable.” What are you even talking about? It makes you uncomfortable? And I’m supposed to care about you being comfortable when my infant is hungry? Dude, you gotta figure that one out. If a baby eating makes you uncomfortable, you have some serious soul searching to do. Leave the mothers alone. Let them do their thing. It’s hard enough without all the societal road blocks we have in place, the judgement, the criticism, and then when they try to do it right, when they try to follow the advice, it’s “would you please not do that here. It makes me uncomfortable.” And that’s motherhood in the modern world. So shout out to all the moms out there today and every day. I see you and I know that what you’re doing is thankless most of the time. But we don’t do it for the thanks and we don’t do it for the praise. We do it because, if we didn’t, humanity would cease to exist. Call your mother or mother figure today if you’re lucky enough to be able to. Tell her thank you for feeding me, however you managed it. I know it wasn’t easy. 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from The Journal of Perinatal Education, the CDC, the US Department of Labor, Mamava, the GinPolMed Project, and Time Magazine. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.