In the 21st Century United States we speak disparagingly of superstition. Superstition is supposedly a feature of backward, indigenous cultures, not our culture.

According to Wikipedia:

Superstition is a pejorative term for any belief or practice that is considered irrational or supernatural: for example, if it arises from ignorance, a misunderstanding of science or causality, a positive belief in fate or magic, or fear of that which is unknown.

But industrialized cultures have supersitions, too. We just call them urban legends.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Only those privileged with easy access to the technology of vaccination could indulge the nonsensical fantasy that natural immunity is best.[/pullquote]

Like superstitions, they are usually irrational, involving a misunderstanding of science or causality.

Like superstition they seek to explain observed phenomena in a way comprehensible to those without advanced education.

And like superstition, it often gives believers the illusion that they have more control over bad things that could happen to them than they really do.

Superstitions include things like black cats, walking under ladders and opening umbrellas indoors. Avoiding them is supposed to prevent bad luck. But since there is no way that they could cause bad luck in the first place, avoidance as a preventative merely gives the comforting illusion of control over the uncontrollable. Only the “unsophisticated” could possibly believe that and even they have trouble defending these beliefs in a rational way.

Urban legends, in contrast, are imagined by their believers, including sophisticated believers, to be true.

There are other significant differences:

Unlike superstitions that are generally spread by word of mouth, urban legends are spread by technology — talk radio, FoxNews and especially social media like Facebook.

In contrast to superstitions, they are often about technology.

They tend to invoke conspiracies in which agents of technology use that technology to harm a gullible public.

Indeed, urban legends are only possible among the technologically privileged.

What does any of this have to do with mothering?

Nearly everything encompassed by “natural mothering” has an urban legend at its heart, an urban legend that could only be believed by the technologically privileged.

Only those with easy access to modern obstetrics could believe the urban legend that “normal” birth is best.

Only those with easy access to formula and clean water could believe the urban legend that ‘breast is best.”

Only those with easy access to a steady supply of safe, nutritious food could believe the urban legend that organic food is best.

In other words, only the technologically privileged have the luxury of fantasizing natural is best.

The ultimate urban legend of our time, of course, is anti-vaccine advocacy. Only those privileged with easy access to the technology of vaccination could indulge the nonsensical fantasy that natural immunity is best.

Anti-vax has many of the classic attributes of urban legends:

The teller of an urban legend may claim it happened to a friend (or to a friend of a friend), which serves to personalize, authenticate and enhance the power of the narrative …

All anti-vaxxers have a friend, a friend of a friend, or a Facebook friend whose child was completely normal until he or she received a vaccine or multiple vaccines.

Many urban legends depict horrific crimes, contaminated foods, or other situations which would potentially affect many people.

The implicit message of anti-vax propaganda is always that this could happen to you or your child. And when it happens, it is the result of a vast global conspiracy involving nearly the entire medication profession, pharmaceutical industry and public health apparatus of every country in the world!

Anyone believing such stories might feel compelled to warn loved ones.

Anti-vaxxers imagine their ravings as a public service.

Persistent urban legends often maintain a degree of plausibility …

The idea that vaccines could cause autism or other serious side effects is theoretically possible, but it has been debunked so often and so comprehensively that it has been proven to be untrue.

But the key feature of the anti-vax urban legend is technological privilege. Anti-vaxxers invariably have no personal experience of nature. Anti-vax beliefs can only take root and flourish in societies that are capable of nearly eradicating diseases by vaccination. No one who has personal experiences of diseases like tetanus, diphtheria, polio, pertussis and measles could be ignorant enough to believe they aren’t dangerous or were disappearing before the advent of vaccines.

Only those who have no direct experience of nature as it existed before technology — not “nature” imagined as lovely vacation spots — could be gullible enough to imagine that nature creates perfection or cares whether you live or die. “Nature is red in tooth and claw” is more than poetry. Evolution, by definition, involves the survival of the fittest, which sounds nicer than acknowledging that most animals (humans included) ended up as dinner for other animals, possibly before but often after being weakened by injury, disease or age.

The same goes for birth, breastfeeding and food:

Survival of the fittest means that massive numbers of women died in childbirth often after agonizing, unproductive labors that lasted days before infection set in or the uterus ruptured leading to hemorrhage that killed both baby and mother.

Survival of the fittest means that massive numbers of babies died from insufficient breastmilk, suffering days or weeks of hunger before slowly starving to death, or being carried off by disease.

Survival of the fittest means that in a world of no fertilizers or large scale industrial production, famine and the resulting human misery were common, slowly and painfully killing massive numbers of people.

Survival of the fittest means that in a world dependent on natural immunity, massive numbers of children died of vaccine preventable diseases before they reached the age of 10. Even those fit enough to reach that age could be carried off at any moment by smallpox, plague or even flu.

Anti-vax is the ultimate urban legend: it is based on misunderstanding of both science and causality, is propagated by technological media, and imparts a false sense of control over bad outcomes where no control exists. Only those so insulated from nature by technological privilege could even pretend that natural is best.

Is there anyone more patronizing then the doctor who visits an indigenous culture and — imagining himself as doing nothing but good — goes where he is not wanted, is a poor guest, allows personal goals to take priority over the goals of the natives, fails to match technology to the needs of the local population, neglects to create a follow up plan and leaves a mess behind when he departs? In other words, the patronizing doctor provides what he believes the benighted patient needs, leaving the patient without what she needs, and then decamps back to civilization congratulating himself on a job well done.

Amazingly it is possible that there are people who are even more patronizing than such doctors; they are midwives and lactation professionals.

They, too, believe themselves to be on humanitarian misssions to enlighten the natives and gift them with what they imagine to be their priceless services. But in their case, the “indigenous culture” is our own and the benighted patients are women who have not been captured by natural childbirth and lactivists ideologies. When their services are not greeted with the unalloyed gratitude they expected, they are shocked, angered and hurt. There is much they could learn from the mistakes doctors have made.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Apparently, the problem with patronizing medical professionals was not that they were patronizing, but that midwives and lactation consultants weren’t the patronizing professionals![/pullquote]

As a paper on the deadly sins of humanitarian medical missions by Welling et al. explains:

This article is in no way meant to denigrate the good works of those who participate in humanitarian missions. We salute all those in these sorts of activities, realizing that there often is real sacrifice made, including the sacrifice of time, money, and equipment… We have great respect for all who go forth to serve. Surely those who aspire to help others almost always do so with honorable intent, and almost never set out to satisfy selfish desires. However, despite our good intentions, mistakes continue to be made …

These same principles apply equally to many midwives and lactation professionals. They believe that by promoting “normal” birth and breastfeeding, they are engaged in a humanitarian mission of the highest order. They often make real sacrifices and they do so with honorable intents. Yet, in doing so, they make terrible mistakes that harm women and babies.

The authors highlight the dangers of patronizing behavior:

As to how one should conduct oneself when on a humanitarian mission, a dose of humility might get us off on the right foot as we begin. Anything that looks like boorish behavior, or condescension, or a patronizing attitude … is detrimental to our efforts and will leave an unpleasant memory of us for those who would be our patients and our colleagues… We should go with the desire to see a different way to render care, instead of insisting that our way is the only correct way possible.

This is good advice for doctors heading to developing countries and it is good advice for midwives and lactation consultants heading to maternity wards.

There is no place for boorish behavior (denying epidurals, grabbing women’s breasts without consent); there is no place for condescension (imaging women who don’t want unmedicated vaginal births or who don’t want to breastfeed as ignorant victims of the medical patriarchy); and there is no place for patronizing attitudes (“C-sections aren’t real births,” “Fed is Minimal”). They leave women with trauma, not gratitude. There are other ways to render good care than natural childbirth and lactivist ideologies.

Furthermore, in humanitarian missions:

Motives should be questioned. We ought to aggressively plan activities that will do the most good for our patients, and we ought to shun those activities that are more designed for our own personal aggrandizement…

Midwives and lactation professionals need to question their own motives. Are midwives promoting unmedicated vaginal birth because it is truly a “one size fits all” benefit or because it enhances midwives’ power relative to other medical professionals? Are lactation consultants aggressively pressuring women to breastfeed because breastfeeding is a “one size fits all” way to maximize infant and maternal health or because it enhances lactation consultants’ employment opportunities?

Most importantly, doctors on humanitarian missions should go to the patients who want to be treated, not to populations who don’t want their skills. They should provide the services that patients want, not the services that the doctors want to give.

Midwives should care for the patients who prize unmedicated vaginal birth, not force patients who want epidurals and C-sections to have unmedicated vaginal births. Lactation consultants should be providing their services to women who want to breastfeed, not forcing everyone to accept their services so that they can pressure everyone to breastfeed.

Doctors on humanitarian missions should respect local traditions, not seek to replace them with the values of industrialized societies. They should treat patients from developing countries as autonomous individuals fully capable of making decisions about their own bodies.

Similarly, midwives should respect the “traditions” of our culture where women are entitled to pain relief in labor and to infant formula to feed their babies, not seek to replace them with midwifery values. Lactation consultants should treat women who can’t or don’t wish to breastfeed as autonomous individuals fully capable of making feeding decisions about their own bodies for their own babies, not as ignorant dupes of corporate behavior. Otherwise, both will merely recapitulate the worst behavior of paternalistic physicians.

Sadly, the greatest irony of contemporary natural childbirth advocacy and lactivism is that its practitioners have become everything they claimed to despise in doctors. It turns out that the problem they had with patronizing medical professionals is not the fact that the professionals were patronizing, but the fact that they weren’t the patronizing professionals

Everything old is new again and that applies to demonic possession. Only now some people call it “vaccine injuries.”

Demonic possession is believed by some to be the process by which individuals are possessed by malevolent preternatural beings, commonly referred to as demons or devils.

Historically it has been used to explain symptoms and illnesses that otherwise seemed inexplicable, particularly neurological and psychiatric symptoms like seizures and mental illness.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Not surprisingly, cures involve the modern analogue of exorcism: detoxing.[/pullquote]

In some Catholic doctrine demonic possession can take multiple different forms, including:

• Possession, in which Satan or some demon(s) takes full possession of a person’s body without their knowledge or consent, so the victim is therefore morally blameless.
• Obsession, which includes sudden attacks of irrationally obsessive thoughts, usually culminating in suicidal ideation, and typically influences dreams.

When we knew very little about the function of the brain, the idea that seizures — with their loss of awareness, involuntary movements and altered mental state in the aftermath — were caused by demons temporarily possessing an individual was quite compelling; the true cause, an electrical storm in the brain, was beyond comprehension.

When we knew very little about psychiatry, the idea that mania, depression and psychosis — profound alterations in behavior of beloved family members and friends — was the result of demons was a lot more believable than the concept of altered levels of neurotransmitters.

Even today, autism — the paradigmatic vaccine “injury” — is both frightening and apparently inexplicable. A previously health toddler, one who has begun to socialize and acquire language, regresses and develops profoundly disturbing behavior, including:

• Repetitive movements, such as hand flapping, head rolling, or body rocking.
• Compulsive behaviors … such as placing objects in a specific order, checking things, or hand washing.
• Resistance to change; for example, insisting that the furniture not be moved or refusing to be interrupted.
• Ritualistic behavior: Unvarying pattern of daily activities, such as an unchanging menu or a dressing ritual…
• Interests or fixations that are abnormal in theme or intensity of focus, such as preoccupation with a single television program, toy, or game.
• Self-injury: Behaviors such as eye-poking, skin-picking, hand-biting and head-banging.

Demonic possession offers an comprehensible explanation, and, importantly, an explanation in which parents bear no responsibility for the bizarre symptoms. But in 2019 most people in industrialized countries recognize that claiming their child is possessed by demons would be considered bizarrely superstitious. So they’ve hit upon a new name for the same phenomenon: vaccine injury. It is a simple, easily understandable explanation that, importantly, places no responsibility for the bizarre symptoms on parents or their genes.

All vaccine “injuries” share common attributes. Anti-vaxxers never claim that a vaccines causes heart disease, gall bladder disease, bone abnormalities or any of the myriad diseases for which causes are already known. They always insist that vaccines cause autism, vague “damage to the immune system” or unspecified neurologic injury.

In “All manner of ills”: The features of serious diseases attributed to vaccination, authors Leask, et al. explain the common features:

Idiopathic nature (unknown cause):

Anti-vaccination writings tend to attribute causal connections between vaccination and diseases with idiopathic origin. Autism, asthma, multiple sclerosis, cancers, diabetes and Gulf War Syndrome have all baffled science and draw intense media interest when new claims about their origin arise. Their power comes from the suggestion that danger lurks in the familiar, with the sub-text that vaccines are modern day Trojan horses, promising prevention but disguising hidden threats.

Apparent rise in incidence:

Along with having idiopathic origin, diseases like autism and asthma appear to have increased in incidence in recent decades. Anti-vaccinationists allege this increase coincides with more vaccination…

Dreaded outcomes:

Many of the ills attributed to vaccination have lethal, insidious or dreaded consequences. SIDS, autoimmune disorders and developmental disability are a few examples. Such qualitative components of dreaded diseases reduce the acceptability of even minute risks…

Temporal relationship to vaccination:

Some of the diseases most often attributed to vaccines become apparent in early childhood when many vaccines are given. In such cases, parents understandably search for an agent of blame, scouring their memories for events shortly before the illness… For parents who may feel guilt, albeit unwarranted, about their child’s problem, vaccination is a graspable external cause…

Not surprisingly, since vaccine injuries are the modern analogue of demonic possession, cures involve modern analogues of exorcism.

Exorcism is the religious or spiritual practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person, or an area, that are believed to be possessed…

Attempts to “cure” autism and other purported vaccine injuries involve bizarre efforts at “detoxifying,” with special diets, supplements or medications.

According to the folks at Body Ecology:

How important is the Body Ecology Principle of Cleansing and detoxification for autism recovery? We believe it’s absolutely essential. Here’s why: children affected with autism often have a build-up of toxicity from exposure to chemicals, metals and environmental poisons, as well as internal bacterial and viral infections, like candida.

The webpage reads as if it were a Saturday Night Live sketch:

It’s liver cleansing season. Doug, can you tell us how important detoxification was to your family during Dougie’s recovery and if you have changed his diet or added detoxification techniques during this time of year to help him cleanse more?

A: Well, it was clear to me very early on that my son, Dougie was filled with poisons. Many parents have different stories. But our son’s health gradually declined as a result of countless ear infections, throat infections, colds, fevers — ­ you name it. At this point, of course, he was also regressing developmentally, but I didn’t link the two right away…

Doug, had he lives a few hundred years earlier, could just as easily ascribed Dougie’s difficulties to demons and embarked on a course of exorcism. Dougie probably would have been better served by being subjected to a useless exorcism, rather than detoxing.

It can get far worse. There are Facebook groups involving thousands of members who force their autistic children to ingest bleach either by drinking it or through enemas. The “theory” is that autism is caused by parasites and the bleach kills them. When children begin to shed their intestinal lining as a result of the “treatment,” the parents believe this is evidence of the parasites leaving their bodies. It’s a chemical exorcism.

Many of us marvel when we consider that people used to believe that demons caused illness. But just like the demon believers, people still seek explanations for behavior of loved ones that otherwise seems inexplicable. So demonic possession has made a comeback among anti-vaxxers; but now they call it vaccine injured.

Formula is Feminist!

That’s the title of my latest piece for Slate.

As I’ve written repeatedly over the years: her baby, her body, her breasts, her choice! Therefore, the decision of the British Medical Journal to ban formula advertising is deeply anti-feminist:

Formula is a legitimate solution to what is often a serious health problem (and a feminist solution to an age-old gendered problem). The argument the BMJ has deployed to explain its decision to limit advertisements isn’t justified by the scientific evidence and instead shows its willingness to pressure women to use their bodies in culturally approved ways.

It’s incontrovertible, yet lactivists are are arguing, although the piece has sparked nuanced discussion in at least one forum.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The same people who would be apoplectic if anyone were to mandate the presence of “pregnancy is best” on birth control pills are nonetheless delighted by the exact same restriction on formula.[/pullquote]

The objection to my claim that formula is feminist run the gamut from hypocritical to very hypocritical.

Formula companies have put profits before people!

Sorry, but if you won’t restrict drug advertising because Big Pharma has a history of harming people for profit, don’t tell me you want to restrict formula advertising because Big Formula has a history of harming people for profit.

Formula advertising makes formula more expensive!

If lactivists cared about the price of formula, they’d allow sales, coupons and free samples and yet they don’t.

Corporations have no right to monetize life saving products!

Seriously? Every other lifesaving product is monetized — food, central heating, medical care — yet we are supposed to believe that formula should be uniquely free from profit?

The most powerful argument against efforts to limit not merely formula use but even mention of formula is a very basic truth: women have an unfettered right to control their own bodies and breasts are part of their bodies.

The ugly truth, however, is that lactivists believe a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is expelled with he placenta. Therefore, women must be pressured to breastfeed by any means they can think of — restricting formula advertising, mandating “breast is best” on infant formula packaging, aggressive breastfeeding promotion in hospitals, the closing of well baby nurseries to “promote” breastfeeding, etc.

The same people who would be appalled by restrictions on contraceptive advertising and apoplectic if anyone were to mandate the presence of “pregnancy is best” on birth control pills are nonetheless delighted by the exact same restrictions on formula.

The same people who believe that women can and should participate fully in every possible job and career look askance at the one product — formula — that levels the playing field for mothers and fathers.

The same people who claim to prize gender equity in parenting fail to see the irony of demonizing the only product that allows for gender equity in infant feeding.

The same people who would argue vociferously against forcing women to donate blood or bone marrow without their consent — even if it would save a life — are all in favor of forcing women to donate breast milk (sometimes non-existent breastmilk) for the “benefit” of their children.

The same people who demand every possible form of support for women who want to use their breasts to feed their babies insist that women who don’t want to use their breasts should be penalized and shamed.

The same people who are “pro choice” when it comes to women’s decisions about pregnancy are emphatically anti-choice when it comes to breastfeeding.

Some lactivists have recognized that irony and have sought to portray themselves as “beyond choice.”

The “beyond formula vs breastfeeding debate” position focuses on constraints to successful breastfeeding, addressing breastfeeding and women’s economic, social, and political status. It is assumed that women are constrained by structural factors and that these factors should be addressed instead.

In this view, it is acceptable to ban formula advertising because it “manipulates” women.

But they cannot square the circle because, for them, there is only one acceptable choice: breastfeeding.

Shifting focus to obstacles and support means that women would choose to breastfeed (“all woman will ‘naturally’ adore breastfeeding”), if they get proper support.

Pro-choice feminists (I consider myself to be part of this group) are deeply concerned about the way that women have become invisible within lactivist culture. Women’s pain, frustrations and difficulties are viewed as meaningless when compared to the supposed massive benefits conferred on babies.

We are equally concerned about the biological essentialism that is such as notable feature of contemporary lactivism. Lactivists appear to think that the fact that women are born with breasts means that they are morally obligated to use them. They conveniently ignore the fact that those same women are born with brains and are quite capable of using them to make the choice that is best for their children and themselves.

But most of all we are concerned with women’s right to control their own bodies.

I agree with Philosophy Professor Rebecca Kukla:

We need to think hard about the condescension and even the strategic imprudence involved in throwing our social resources into finding yet more ways of giving women information they already have [or as in this case preventing them from accessing information about formula]. Even more fundamentally, we need to question our assumption that improper education is the cause of low breastfeeding rates.

This is an issue of medical ethics:

…The current strategies and imagery used by American [and British] breastfeeding advocates … are not only inappropriate, but also constitute unethical assaults on new mothers’ autonomy and agency…

It is a violation of women’s bodily autonomy to pressure women to breastfeed.

With respect to breastfeeding, our public health goal should be to make breastfeeding a livable, comfortable, well-informed option for women, and not to cripple women’s ability to find a way of making caring choices for their children.

Women’s right to bodily autonomy is NOT expelled with the placenta and lactivists should not forget it!

It is so vicious as to seem inexplicable.

According to CNN:

Not long ago, a 4-year-old boy died of the flu. His mother, under doctor’s orders, watched his two little brothers like a hawk, terrified they might get sick and die, too.

Grieving and frightened, just days after her son’s death she checked her Facebook page hoping to read messages of comfort from family and friends.

Instead, she found dozens of hateful comments: You’re a terrible mother. You killed your child. You deserved what happened to your son. This is all fake – your child doesn’t exist.

They are not the first family to suffer this additional horror and they won’t be the last:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Anti-vaxxers experience the death of another person’s child from a vaccine preventable disease as a narcissistic injury and react with narcissistic rage.[/pullquote]

Interviews with mothers who’ve lost children and with those who spy on anti-vaccination groups, reveal a tactic employed by anti-vaxers: When a child dies, members of the group sometimes encourage each other to go on that parent’s Facebook page. The anti-vaxers then post messages telling the parents they’re lying and their child never existed, or that the parent murdered them, or that vaccines killed the child, or some combination of all of those.

What leads anti-vaxxers to such depraved behavior? Their monstrous vanity.

Wait, what? You thought the anti-vaccine lobby was concerned with the health of children? Think again.

The anti-vax movement has never been about children, and it hasn’t even been about vaccines. It’s about privileged parents and how they wish to view themselves.

Privileged

Nothing screams “privilege” louder than ostentatiously refusing something that those less privileged wish to have. In a world where the underprivileged may trudge miles to the nearest clinic, desperate to save their babies from infectious scourges, nothing communicates the unbelievable ease and selfishness of modern American life like refusing the very same vaccines.

Transgressive

Anti-vaxxers are intellectual toddlers having an extended tantrum.

Unreflective acceptance of authority, whether that authority is the government or industry, is a bad thing. BUT unreflective defiance is no different. Oftentimes, the government, or industry, is right about a particular set of claims.

Experts in a particular topic, such as vaccines, really are experts. They really know things that the lay public does not. Moreover, it is not common to get a tremendous consensus among experts from different fields. Experts in immunology, pediatrics, public health and just about everything else you can think of have weighed in on the side of vaccines. Experts in immunology, pediatrics and public health give vaccines to their OWN children, rendering claims that they are engaged in a conspiracy to hide the dangers of vaccines to be nothing short of ludicrous.

Unfortunately, most anti-vax parents, like most toddlers, consider defiance of authority to be a source of pride, whether that defiance is objectively beneficial or not.

“Empowered”

This is what is comes down to for most anti-vax parents: their egos. Anti-vax is a source of self-esteem for them. In their minds, they have “educated” themselves. How do they know they are “educated”? Because they’ve chosen to disregard experts (who appear to them as authority figures) in favor of quacks and charlatans, whom they admire for their own defiance of authority. The combination of self-education and defiance of authority is viewed by anti-vax parents as an empowering form of rugged individualism, marking out their own superiority from those pathetic “sheeple” who aren’t self-educated and who follow authority.

As a result, anti-vaxxers have monstrous egos that are pathetically fragile. Psychologically, they cannot tolerate being wrong about anti-vax ideology on which they have staked their identity and sense of self worth. Shockingly, they experience the death of a child from a vaccine preventable disease — a death their ideology tells them could not possibly have happened — an a narcissistic injury to themselves and react with all the fury that implies.

Anti-vaxxers lash out at the families of children who have died of vaccine preventable diseases in spasms of narcissistic rage.

Why do people with narcissism react so vehemently when threatened by a seemingly minor offense? …

Their grandiose views of themselves are threatened by perceived attacks. These grandiose views of themselves are necessary for their self-preservation. When threatened, they are not merely offended, but their entire sense of self is at stake…

Wikipedia describes it best:

…Narcissistic rage is the uncontrollable and unexpected anger that results from a narcissistic injury – a threat to a narcissist’s self-esteem or worth. Rage comes in many forms, but all pertain to the same important thing, revenge. Narcissistic rages are based on fear and will endure even after the threat is gone.

To the narcissist, the rage is directed towards the person that they feel has slighted them; to other people, the rage is incoherent and unjust… During the rage they are prone to shouting, fact distortion and making groundless accusations… [N]arcissists may even search for conflict to find a way to alleviate pain or suffering …

This narcissistic rage explains why anti-vaxxers will search out parents whose children died of vaccine preventable diseases to vent their terror — and shore up their fragile egos — through harassment, fact distortion and groundless (as well as heartless) accusations.

So when I see anti-vaxxers attacking the family of a child who died of pertussis or flu, my first thought is sympathy for that family, already grappling with unimaginable tragedy, being victimized over and over again by anti-vaxxers.

My second thought is pity for anti-vaxxers. Imagine the abject fear and rage that drives these people; fear that they have been wrong all along and rage that an innocent child dared to die in a way that exposes the hollowness of their ideology and fragility of their egos.

Anti-vaxxers are pathetic and I’m not just talking about their fundamental ignorance of immunology, science and statistics.

One of the most disturbing things about the natural childbirth and lactivists movements is the way they treat our distant foremothers; they treat them the same way we tend to treat all people who are non-white and non-industrialized, as one mass of undifferentiated, never changing animals.

It seems to have never occurred to them that for most of 30+ thousand years prior to the advent of writing, human beings existed in discrete cultures with discrete cultural practices. They had highly advanced civilizations complete with tools, pottery, and art … as well as traditions around birth and breastfeeding.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Exclusive, extended breastfeeding is like the missionary position: just one possible choice among many natural choices.[/perfectpullquote]

Natural childbirth and breastfeeding advocates don’t really pay much attention to what those specific traditions are. Either they behaved like animals relying on their “instinct” (just like contemporary natural childbirth and breastfeeding advocates!) or, to the extent that their traditions differed — think belief that childbearing women were unclean or supplemented their babies with prelacteal feeds — ignorant and “uncivilized.”

Why does it matter? Because both natural childbirth advocates and lactivists are longing for a past that may have never actually existed. Practices like exclusive, extended breastfeeding may exist only in their imaginations and nowhere else.

That’s what Anthropology Prof. Jonathan Wells explains in The Role of Cultural Factors in Human Breastfeeding: Adaptive Behaviour or Biopower?

Referring to the variability of breastfeeding practices among cultures, he notes:

Evidence from a variety of sources, including isotopic analyses of prehistoric skeletons … is consistent with the long-standing primary role of breast-feeding in infant nutrition, but both the historical and ethnographic literatures offer ample evidence that exclusive maternal breast-feeding for the first six months of life cannot be considered either “traditional” or the “natural” norm.

Furthermore, even when exclusive breast-feeding is practised it is not … an “instinctive” or uniform process.

He points out a phenomenon that contemporary lactivists prefer to elide:

Cultural factors therefore pervade breastfeeding at many levels. As the benefits of breastfeeding become clearer to the medical scientific community, those seeking to influence maternal behaviour, with the aim of improving maternal and child health, must develop an improved understanding of the role of cultural factors in infant feeding…

While all mammals suckle their young, there is wide variation in breastfeeding behaviors:

Mother-infant suckling interactions can be considered through a continuum model … At one extreme are altricial infant marsupials and monotremes, born in a premature condition and spending days or even weeks in the maternal pouch attached continuously to the teat. At the other extreme are the precocial ungulates and cetaceans, well developed and fully able to move on their own from birth. Primates lie between these extremes, and have been termed semi-altricial.

In many species, whether altricial or precocial, suckling is a relatively instinctive process. The newborn kangaroo searches out the teat itself, despite its relatively early stage of physical development… Many ungulates can stand very quickly after birth and orient towards the mother to search for the teat. In contrast, primate infants contribute less proactively to the initiation of feeding … The role of offspring instinct appears to be decreased, and there is an increased role of the mother, including learned maternal behaviour, in instigating lactation…

Even among animals, there is a cultural dimension to infant feeding:

In chimpanzees, our closest primate relative, both tradition and learning contribute significantly to the ontogeny of the offspring’s diet. Whiten and colleagues analysed data from a number of relatively discretely distributed populations, and found that groups inhabiting similar ecological environments nevertheless differed in the types of behaviour demonstrated. This scenario extends to diet, with only a selection of all possible foods eaten by any given group. These analyses demonstrated that both innovation of behaviour within populations, and diffusion of behaviour between populations, were important factors in accounting for nutritional intake.

Chimpanzee nutrition in general, including lactation, therefore involves “culture” – the learning of behaviour from others who have also learned it … This role of culture is relevant to our theoretical understanding of instinct in animal behaviour, and the notion of what is “natural” in human behaviour.

Indeed:

Despite the tendency to portray human breastfeeding as a “natural” process, in opposition to supposedly “unnatural” approaches such as bottle feeding, the reality is that there is no single “instinctive “ or “natural” way to breastfeed…

Breastfeeding resembles sex in this way. Labeling exclusive, extended breastfeeding as natural in opposition to any possible variation makes as much sense as labeling the missionary position natural and any other forms or practices of sexuality as “unnatural.”

Both lactivist recommendations and medical recommendations about breastfeeding often ignore this fundamental reality, assuming — despite widespread evidence of a multiplicity of cultural practices around breastfeeding — that exclusive, extended breastfeeding is “natural.” Then, through the use of biopower, they pressure women to conform to a “natural” practice that never existed in nature.

Biopower does not involve overt repression or force, but employs quiet and subtle coercions whose very invisibility enhances their effectiveness. Techniques include normalizing judgements which subtly define the properness of an indivdual’s behaviour, the institutionalisation of knowledge through which individuals are objectified and devalued, and the “panoptic gaze” which subjects individuals to continual surveillance …

That is similar to the way in which biopower is exerted around homosexuality and gender identity. Until very recently, our society objectified and devalued gay and transgender individuals, in some cases going as far as characterizing their behavior as criminal.

The exertion of biopower around breastfeeding has been going on for centuries:

While the literature does not tell us what women actually did in previous generations, it shows that male institutions and interest groups have had a long-standing role in prescribing “optimal” feeding, while also simultaneously containing many normative judgements of acceptable and unacceptable maternal behaviour…

The central role of breastfeeding in the generation of biopower can be attributed to the competing demands on women’s identities and hence behaviour. Women may simultaneously be daughters, sisters, wives or partners, and mothers. Perhaps most importantly, the sexual relationship between women and their partners may conflict with maternal roles, particularly given the relationships between lactational ammenorrhoea and breastfeeding duration. Maher has argued that male control over breastfeeding tends to be stronger in societies emphasising marriage and childbearing as “institutions for the confirmation of wealth and status”. More generally, the nature and duration of breastfeeding are a function of negotiation between the two sexes pursuing different goals …

Of course men are not the only ones who employ biopower around breastfeeding. Lactation professionals consider it an imperative to pressure women into breastfeeding whether they want to do or not, whether they are capable of doing so or not, whether it is in their best interests and the best interests of their babies or not.

They are no different than insitutions and authority figures who consider it imperative to pressure all individuals into heterosexual, penetrative, intravaginal intercourse whether that is what they want to do or not, whether it is in their best interests or not.

The bottom line is that the decision by lactivists to portray exclusive, extended breastfeeding as natural is an example of biopower in action.

It isn’t merely longing for a past that never existed; it can be actively harmful to women and babies.

Women’s biology has always been used against them and to control them.

For example, although pregnancy requires two people — one male, one female — only women get pregnant, carry babies and give birth. Therefore, women can be coerced and manipulated through government and economic policies around access to birth control and pregnancy termination.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Breastfeeding promotion is the exercise of biopower over new mothers, targeting them as objects to be manipulated and trained.[/pullquote]

For what it perceived as legitimate health interests, the government of China enforced a one child policy, forcing women to have abortions they did not want, and punishing women who gave birth to a second or third child.

For what it claims are legitimate health interests, conservative politicians in the US promote ever more burdensome and arcane restrictions on abortion access, forcing women to give birth to children they do not want, risking their lives, health and ambitions for themselves.

Using government and economic policies in this way is an expression of biopower.

As Robyn Lee explains in Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding: Power, Pleasure, Poetics:

Biopower refers to knowledge and strategies of power that aim at governing a population’s life forces, involving the security of populations, the optimization of their health, and the discipline of their bodies. Governments exert increasing control over variables such as birth and death rates, rates of illness, fertility, rates of sexual activities, life expectancy, migration and nutrition… Through biopower, techniques of population control permeate all levels of life. Under the influence of biopower, the freedom and truth of the individual are defined in economic and biological terms.

It’s easy to understand how China’s one child policy and conservatives’ efforts to restrict abortion access are abuses of biopower. It is perhaps less obvious, but equally true, that contemporary breastfeeding policies are also an abuse of biopower.

As part of the influence of biopower, a technology of population emerged, beginning in the eighteenth century, which had two aspects: (1) the child and the medicalization of the family, and (2) hygiene, and the function of medicine as a form of social control… Breastfeeding became an area of concern because it involved both these aspects…

Contemporary breastfeeding promotion efforts like the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative are aggressive efforts to exert biopower over women:

The influence of biopower on breastfeeding continues in the contemporary context; it can be seen in ongoing efforts to increase the initiation rates and duration of breastfeeding… [R]ules, norms, and the provision of [breastfeeding] advice represent a form of biopower through control that is exercised over the identity and behavior of women.

Biopower also involves disciplinary power that targets the human body as an object to be manipulated and trained… Conceptions of good mothering as requiring breastfeeding become internalized by individuals who carry out self-policing in relation to these norms.

Biopower is an apparently benevolent, but peculiarly invasive, form of social control.

Biopower relies on process of self-disciplining: individuals are encouraged to become agents of their own subjection through incorporating within themselves external authority structures including dominant cultural ideals and practices.

Though lactation professionals like to bewail the medicalization of infant feeding that occurred with the introduction of formula, they are deeply committed to perpetuating the medicalization of infant feeding. Just as doctors once used the language and authority of science to promote formula feeding as best, lactivists now use the language and authority science to promote breastfeeding as best. The fundamental assumption of lactation professionals everywhere is that science justifies their invasive efforts to control women’s behavior.

By medicalizing infant feeding in this way, they deploy the classic techniques of medicalization: “the expansion of medical jurisdiction and its use as a mechanism of social control through the medical gaze and surveillance.” It’s difficult to come up with a more accurate description of programs like the BFHI than that. It is an expansion of medical jurisdiction (mobilizing medical personnel to achieve its aims); it’s a mechanism of social control of women; and it brings the laser-like focus of the medical gaze on women with its surveillance techniques of constantly measuring rates of exclusive and extended breastfeeding.

The result, ironically, is that infant feeding has never been more medicalized than it has become under the influence of the lactation profession.

Breastfeeding expertise has been transferred away from women as a result of the medicalization of infant feeding, with breastfeeding norms largely determined by expert medical advice to women. Medical researchers assume their recommendations are valuable advice that can significant reduce infant morbidity and mortality… They also assume that they have the right to dispense such advice …

Moreover, while it is easy to understand how making it difficult for women to access to birth control is an unacceptable way of using women’s biology to control them, it is harder for some people to understand that making it difficult for women to access formula is an equally unacceptable way of using women’s biology to control them.

The truth is that current breastfeeding promotion efforts are an abuse of biopower by lactation professionals under the aegis of government and medical authority. It is purportedly justified (as are most uses and abuses of biopower) by the belief that it is “best” for the population of babies and mothers, while simultaneously ignoring the lived experiences of individual babies and mothers.

These breastfeeding promotion efforts are the exercise of disciplinary power over new mothers, targeting them as objects to be manipulated and trained. Women are encouraged by lactation “authorities” to become agents of their own subjugation, surrendering their bodies and lives to a medicalized view of infant feeding. That is unethical, unacceptable and profoundly wrong.

Apparently, the term birthrape didn’t work out so well for the natural childbirth industry.

It was in vogue for several years, but generated not the outrage at obstetricians that midwives and doulas were hoping for, but rather revulsion at their appropriation of the suffering of rape victims to publicize their cause.

The new term is obstetric violence.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Campaigns for normal birth are institutionalized obstetric violence.[/pullquote]

According to Birth Monopoly:

Obstetric violence is normalized mistreatment of women and birthing people in the childbirth setting. It is an attempt to control a woman’s body and decisions, violating her autonomy and dignity.

That’s a definition I strongly support. Sadly, natural childbirth advocates can’t stop sensationalizing all obstetric care as violence.

Amie Newman writes on Medium:

I was born in a snowstorm from a woman whose body was stolen. She was knocked out and drugged up hours after arriving at the hospital where she planned to birth her first child. Her doctor told her to stop screaming as she writhed in pain on a white-sheeted gurney, in a crowded hallway of a New York City hospital. She didn’t oblige his request and was eventually sedated, sighing deep with wet-cheeks. She did not know what she was given.

And:

Whose hand held the scissors that cut us apart? Was it the doctor who delivered babies only on Wednesdays? It’s unlikely it was my father’s. He was not allowed in to the room until much later. My mother still does not know who severed the vessel that kept us connected — that kept me alive while in her womb. But she still wishes she knew.

Although unmedicated childbirth with a midwife is often recommended as the “cure” for obstetric violence, the truth is that midwives are among its leading perpetrators. Midwife led “campaigns for normal birth” are a common form of institutionalized obstetric violence in industrialized countries and denying a laboring woman an epidural is a common manifestation.

How could that be?

Consider Amie Newman’s definition of obstetric violence:

It is an umbrella term that includes disrespectful attitudes, coercion, bullying, and discrimination from care providers, lack of consent for examinations or treatment, forced procedures like C-section by court order, and also physical abuse.

It’s hard to imagine anything more disrespectful than telling a woman how she ought to give birth and ignoring what she might want (pain relief, interventions, maternal request C-section), yet this is precisely what campaigns for normal birth do. By campaigning on behalf of a process instead of for patients themselves, proponents of unmedicated vaginal birth are explicitly ignoring the needs and wishes of those patients.

A good rule of thumb for respectful care is: “Nothing about me without me.”

Declaring that unmedicated vaginal birth is an institutionally supported goal instead of one choice among many possible choices, midwifery organizations are most definitely making policy and determining practice WITHOUT the input of women.

Proponents of “normal birth” insist that it is safest, confusing cause and effect. Sure women who have easy vaginal births have fewer complications than women who have C-sections, but that’s like saying people who spend their hospital stay in regular rooms have fewer complications than those who spend their hospital stay in the ICU.

It isn’t the ICU that is associated complications, it’s the need for the ICU. Similarly, it is often not the C-section that is associated with complications, but the need for the C-section. Campaigns of normal birth are as effective in reducing complications as closing ICUs. Not only do those actions fail to prevent complications, they cause more serious ones.

Even if unmedicated vaginal births were safer, that wouldn’t justify pressuring women to aim for them. Paternalism is never a justification for ignoring the specific needs and desires of an individual woman. It is not a justification for obstetricians to do what they want and it is not a justification for midwives to do what they want. Women do not reclaim their agency from obstetricians by handing it over to midwives.

Denying a woman an epidural, delaying her epidural or trying to chivvy her out of getting an epidural are all forms of obstetric violence. There’s something perverse about an entire industry predicated on the concept that excruciating pain is good for women. And there’s something racist about an entire industry that expropriates the (imagined) experiences of indigenous women — who lack access to pain relief — as “authentic.”

Dr JaneMaree Maher of the Centre for Women’s Studies & Gender Research at Monash University in Australia, offers a way of conceptualizing childbirth pain. In her article The painful truth about childbirth: contemporary discourses of Caesareans, risk and the realities of pain, she observes:

… Pain will potentially push birthing women into a non-rational space where we become other; ‘screaming, yelling, self-centered and demanding drugs’. The fear being articulated is two-fold; that birth will hurt a lot and that birth will somehow undo us as subjects. I consider this fear of pain and loss of subjectivity are vitally important factors in the discussions about risks, choices and decisions that subtend … reproductive debates, but they are little acknowledged…

Denying pain relief to a patient is a human rights violation and just because labor is a natural process doesn’t change that fact.

Pressuring women to breastfeed — mandated visits from lactation consultants, withholding access to formula, withholding pacifiers — is also a form of obstetric violence, a particularly infatilizing form. It is an attempt to control a woman’s body and decisions, violating her autonomy and dignity.

Ironically, the vaunted indigenous women often have greater freedom to choose when and how to start breastfeeding than women in “Baby Friendly” hospitals. Prelacteal supplementation is common in many indigenous cultures.

Closing well baby nurseries in an effort to promote breastfeeding is also obstetric violence. Many cultures have mandated weeks after birth as a time when women’s only task is to rest and recover. Only one culture demands that women begin caring for their babies on their own the moment the placenta is delivered: our culture!

The natural childbirth and breastfeeding industries must STOP trying to control women’s bodies and decisions. They must END violations of women’s autonomy and dignity. NO ONE should be trying to reduce epidural rates. NO ONE should be making it difficult for women to access formula. NO ONE should be mandating rooming in for new mothers and their babies.

The natural childbirth and breastfeeding industries are committing obstetric violence when they fail to heed these admonitions.

Lactation professional Prof. Amy Brown was apprised that one of her slides at a recent conference on “holistic” infant sleep could be construed as racist.

Brown predictably responded as she does to any criticism: with fury. But she’d been called out on a tendency that it is all too common in birth and breastfeeding communities: exoticizing poor indigenous women, particularly women of color.

As Alison Phipps has written in The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age:

Complementing [the] focus on the ‘natural’, there is a tendency to search for authenticity and origins in the discussion of alternative birth practices. This … often involves the Orientalizing of ‘traditional’ cultures, whether prehistoric or from developing countries.

Natural childbirth and breastfeeding advocates are channeling Grantly Dick-Read’s notions of “primitive” women, but:

… Like the claims of many contemporary activists, however, Dick-Read’s points were made despite the fact that he had not spent extensive time in non-western countries. The lack of an evidence base to corroborate such assertions is particularly problematic when non-western birthing practices are appropriated in the service of authenticity rather than effectiveness.

Which raises the questions:

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Privileged, white natural mothering advocates silence less privileged women who have different experiences.[/pullquote]

Whose experience counts?
Is it appropriate to use the (imagined) experience of others to advocate for oneself?

In a separate paper, Whose personal is more political? Experience in contemporary feminist politics, Phipps attempts to address these questions.

She argues that the way that privileged, white women use experience — their personal experiences as well as the experiences of others — serves to perpetuate their privilege at the expense of others.

…[P]rivileged feminists, speaking for others and sometimes for themselves, use experience to generate emotion and justify particular agendas, silencing critics who are often from more marginalised social positions.

Specifically:

…Rhetorical use of distressing experiences by the powerful and privileged … turns them into a kind of ‘investment capital’ in what Sara Ahmed terms ‘affective economies,’ by mobilising them to generate feeling and create political gain. In the process, structural dynamics are masked; the privileged are able to capitalise on the personal and deflect critique by marginalised groups whose realities are invisibilised or dismissed, even as they are spoken for.

We see this over and over again among natural parenting advocates. Powerful Western, white, well off women ASSUME they speaking for EVERYONE. They use their own personal experiences and hijack the imagined experiences of others to secure what they wish to have. Even worse, they silence less privileged women who have different experiences.

Both the natural childbirth movement and the lactivist movement are made up nearly entirely of white, professional women and their white, privileged acolytes. They seem to believe that their personal experiences are the only experiences that count; their wishes around birth and breastfeeding are the only ones that are legitimate; and that to the extent that other women have different experiences and wishes, they must be silenced if possible and ignored if they dare to speak up anyway.

We are continually treated to the spectacle of white, privileged midwives convening conferences, attended nearly exclusively by white, privileged audiences, telling the birth stories of white, privileged birthing women for the express purpose of ensuring that the entire medical system to cater ONLY to them. In the process, the imagined experiences of black indigenous women (it’s natural!) are mobilized as justification for ignoring the preferences of contemporary non-white and non-privileged women. How dare they want epidurals, interventions of C-sections? They are either ignorant or have been alienated from their natural instinct.

And should any of those less privileged women with different experiences of childbirth and different needs dare to contradict them on social media they are first treated with smug condescension and then shut down entirely by deleting, blocking and banning.

We are continually treated to the spectacle of white, privileged lactation professionals convening conferences, attended nearly exclusively by white, privileged audiences, telling the breastfeeding stories of white, privileged breastfeeding women for the express purpose of ensuring that the entire medical system cater ONLY to them. In the process, the imagined experiences of black indigenous women (it’s natural!) are mobilized (as in Prof. Brown’s slide) as justification for ignoring the preferences of contemporary non-white and non-privileged women. How dare they want formula? They are either ignorant or have been alienated from their natural instinct.

And should any of those less privileged women with different experiences of breastfeeding and different needs dare to contradict them on social media they are first treated with smug condescension and then shut down entirely by deleting, blocking and banning.

What is the Baby Friendly Hospital Iniatitive if not a spectacle of white, privileged lactation professionals ignoring the lives experiences of indigenous women and substituting a mythical “natural” experience that never existed in nature? In reality many indigenous cultures supplement their babies with prelacteal feeds, and mandate days or weeks before new mothers are required to fully care for their babies and themselves. These are the women whose “experiences” are used to support the BFHI policies of avoiding supplementation at all costs and mandated 24 hour rooming in and the closing of well baby nurseries.

Worst of all, as Phipps writes:

This also has a polarising effect which inhibits connections across differing experiences: indeed, we often participate in selective empathies where we discredit the realities of those who articulate opposing politics.

Natural childbirth advocates discredit the reality of women who suffer agonizing pain in labor and severe childbirth injuries. Lactation professionals loudly and obnoxiously discredit the reality of many women who (along with their babies) have suffered from insufficient breastmilk. They have the temerity to sneer that “fed is minimal.”

Phipps analysis is long and complex but the conclusions are straightforward:

…The injuries felt by those who are more privileged, while certainly painful, are not commensurate with the experience of oppression. Ventriloquising another’s personal story is an act of power, especially when the oppression of this Other is wielded against another Other with whom one
disagrees.

In other words, using the (imagined) experiences of indigenous women is an act of power, especially when those stories are used to oppress other less privileged women in one’s own society.

Disclosing one’s experience of violence in a bid to construct and exclude the Other is violence in itself.

There is nothing wrong with privileged natural childbirth advocates discolosing their experience of disappointment at having an epidural, interventions or a C-section. There is something very wrong with privileged women using their disappointment to discredit the reality of women who welcome epidurals, interventions or C-sections. In a very real sense any “campaign for normal birth” is a form of obstetric violence against women who are less privileged.

There is nothing wrong with privileged lactivists disclosing their experience of lack of breastfeeding support. There is something very wrong with privileged lactivists using their disappointment to discredit the reality of women who don’t want to breastfeed, or worse, to discredit the reality of women who had insufficient breastmilk or other serious breastfeeding problems.

It is always an act of power for birth and breastfeeding professionals to use social media to pontificate about AND then silence (through deleting, blocking and banning) women who have different experiences.

The recently revealed college admissions bribery scandal is, of course, a story of money and privilege. But there’s an aspect that’s receiving less attention even though it may be more important. The scheme is the inevitable result of contemporary mothering philosophy — performative mothering — that treats children as maternal props from birth.

According to the Washington Post:

The Justice Department on Tuesday charged 50 people — including two television stars — with participating in a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme that enabled privileged students with lackluster grades to attend prestigious colleges and universities.

The allegations included cheating on entrance exams and bribing college officials to say certain students were athletic recruits when those students were not in fact athletes, officials said…

The public face has become two celebrity mothers, Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Raise the child you have, not the one you wish you had.[/pullquote]

Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were accused of paying $500,000 in bribes so their two daughters would be designated as recruits for the University of Southern California rowing team — even though they were not part of the team. That helped the pair get into USC, according to the complaint.

And:

Huffman is accused of paying $15,000 — disguised as a charitable donation — to the Key Worldwide Foundation so her oldest daughter could participate in the scam. A confidential informant told investigators that he advised Huffman that he could arrange for a third party to correct her daughter’s answers on the SAT after she took it. She ended up scoring a 1420 — 400 points higher than she had gotten on a PSAT taken a year earlier, according to court documents.

But for me the detail that is most telling is that there is no evidence that the children actually wanted what the mothers schemed to get them. Unbeknownst to the children, they were being used as props to enhance the women’s image of themselves as mothers.

Loughlin’s daughter Olivia, a social media star in her own right, has made it very clear that she doesn’t care about her education:

In April 2017, she tweeted, “it’s so hard to try in school when you don’t care about anything you’re learning,” but the apathy peaked about a month before she was set to enroll at USC in September. She posted a YouTube video in which she admitted she “didn’t know how much” school she would attend. She told her followers she hoped she would “try and balance it all,” and said she was looking forward to “game days” and “partying,” but didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about the experience.

Which raises the questions:

Why couldn’t Loughlin raise the child she had?
Why did she try to make her into the child she preferred?
Simply put, why did she treat her daughter like a prop instead of a person?

The answer, at least in part, can be found in the rise of performative mothering.

As I recently explained, a mother used to be something you were; now it’s something you do, hence the term “mothering.” And you do it under the gaze of other mothers — you perform it — micro-branding yourself by your choices, and disseminating a carefully curated portrayal through social media, artlessly seeking validation through the “likes” of strangers.

I write about the role of performative mothering in childbirth, breastfeeding, attachment parenting and vaccination, but I’m well aware that it extends throughout childhood, up to college and possibly even after that.

In 2019, we are immersed in a culture that believes there is a best way to give birth, the less medical intervention the better. But birth is not “one size fits all.” Some babies are harmed and some even die because — in an effort to mirror the ideal — their mothers refuse lifesaving medical interventions. The baby is just a prop in the mother’s birth performance.

We are immersed in a culture that believes that there is a best way to feed a baby: breast is best. But infant feeding is not “one size fits all.” Breast is not best for every mother and every baby, yet mothers are pressured into literally starving their babies (sometimes leading to permanent brain injuries and death) to continue to breastfeed. The baby is just a prop in the mother’s performance of breastfeeding.

The performative aspect is particularly prominent in breastfeeding promotion, including the emphasis on enforced breastfeeding in hospitals, enforced rooming in, and the near hysteria surrounding public breastfeeding. Lactivists, professional and lay, are obsessed with the public performance of breastfeeding under the gaze of other women.

In 2019, we are immersed in a culture that believes that there are best places to go to college. But education is not “one size fits all.” A college that may be best for one child, may the wrong place for many others. USC is a great institution for some children, but it can be a disaster for an uninterested child unqualified to attend. No matter. Loughlin viewed her daughter as a prop for her performance of motherhood, not a person with needs and desires of her own.

The mothers, indeed all the parents, in the bribery scheme stand to pay significant legal and financial penalties for their unlawful behavior, but they face another penalty that may have greater long term costs. These mothers will have to explain to their children why they treated them as props, wishing them to be something they were not, and paying people so they could perform their mothering to the rest of the world.

There is a lesson here for mothers of children of all ages: raise the child you have, not the one you wish you had.