Why Can’t Our Babies Breastfeed?

The other day I was helping a family with a 3 day old learn to breastfeed.  It was not a victory easily one, a consult that left me sweating by the end.  As we discussed a care plan for this family, the father shyly observed, “You know, I’ve helped delivery a lot of calves and almost all of them can nurse. It is probably a silly comparison, but it seems funny that it is so hard for our baby.” He laughed self deprecatingly expecting me to tell him how very different a human baby is from a dairy calf. But he had struck a cord of mine that had already been filling my days with a low hum. “You are absolutely right,” I responded.  “Human babies should be able to breastfeed, just like the calves you helped deliver.  It is a biological imperative that our young should be able to feed.  The question is, why can’t they?”

I have been plagued by this realization in my practice. Babies are born to breastfeed, yet so many can not.  We place so much emphasis on the a mother’s right to choose how she feeds her baby we have somehow missed the fundamental issue at hand.  Our young, just like any other specie, should be equipped with basic skills for survival, including the ability to eat.  While humans have found a work around in bottling, a major gliche in our biology remains.  Many of our babies cannot eat as biology intended, yet no one seems to be asking why.

What we call breastfeeding today often feels like a cheap imitation of the original.  My job is less about helping families breastfeed as nature intended and more about how we can biohack the system to fit breastfeeding into the tight confines of our frenzied lives. The question always seems to stem from how far we can deviate from the way nature intended and still stay afloat.  Lately, it feels like there is no wiggle room. An already inflamed and harried systems has little to no resilience to be exploited.  Breastfeeding is literally collapsing all around us.

It turns out that it is not just our babies who are unable to breastfeed but mother’s as well.  Many mother’s are having more and more difficulty producing a sufficient milk supply. We can debate the origin of such trends tumbling down the rabbit hole of finger pointing, but I proffer it is a conglomeration of inputs culminating in system failure.  Just like an ecosystem going into decline, it is rarely one challenge that shifts cosmic balance toward destruction.  It is one insult after another that tip the scales.  It is no different with mothers and babies.  As the whole system cants toward meltdown, resilience continues to be undermined requiring greater Herculean efforts to bring mom and baby back to equilibrium.

When I first started as a lactation consultant, I had starry eyed dreams of helping families breastfeed.  I believed women really just need to understand how their lactation cycle worked, the ergonomics of a good latch, coupled with more support to allow them the space to experience a thriving postpartum period. Like waking from a dream, my good intentions dissolved with field experience.  Education and support were not enough.  Even the women who were able to breastfeed for over a year, did so through sheer doggedness and force of will.  Often their baby had a host of therapies and interventions along the way including bodywork, OT, PT, frenectomies, and lactation support.  Meanwhile, the mother is pounding lactogenic herbs, on elimination diets, and when she is not breastfeeding she is pumping.  Is this success? Is this really the only road left to successful breastfeeding?  I mean, what the actual fuck?

Even if breastfeeding was as simple as nature intended, where do you fit in feeding your baby every 2-3 hours around the clock?  You don’t.  We hack the system.  We breastfeed on demand for 3 months of maternity leave and then we ask mother’s to pump every 3 hours at work (which I would venture most women find unattainable).  Then we push them to sleep train their babes, further undermining supply. So again, we hack the system.  Baby needs supported with bigger volumes during the day to make up for the missed night feeds and now mom’s supply begins to dip  as an unintended consequence of night weaning.  Baby needs more milk than mom is producing and the mother is trapped in the double bind of capitulating to formula supplementation or pumping around the clock (even on weekends) to assure there is  enough milk to last through the work week.  This is why it has become a cultural norm for women to build a freezer stash instead of recuperating postpartum. We are literally betting mom’s milk supply will fail. Yet, I believe the problem is deeper than the our cultural distortion of breastfeeding.

There is an opportunity costs from generations who have opted out of breastfeeding.  Declining population health, increasingly toxic environments, food that is literally loosing nutrient density, decreasing movement and fitness, and lack of community, are holes in a crumbling foundation. It is the culminating effect of a collapsing ecosystem at play.  Even for many women who are making a conscious choice to buck the system and breastfeed in resonance with our biology find themselves thwarted. Why? Because our bodies are mirrors of our environment.  Because the collapse of our bodies is a microcosm of the collapse of our habitat.  Because breastfeeding requires vitality and expansion from our moms and babies and they simply do not have the resources and resiliency required. Look around, there are symptoms of collapse everywhere.  Rising infertility rates are another marker of a biological collapse.  The ability to reproduce is as fundamental as the ability to feed our young.

I believe our babies have come to show our ways are not sustainable.  We are lemmings marching toward a cliff.  These babes, who cannot breastfeed, are crying for us to stop. We have an opportunity to slow down and see, just like our children do.  They lay us bare and love us anyway.  That is the gift our children offer us.  To be seen fully both in our wholeness and our brokenness. Our job is to gaze back at the true reflection they hold in front of us and not flinch away from the distortions.  There is work ahead if you choose to accept. The collapse of breastfeeding is a symptom of a deeper pathology.  It is the cancer of self doubt.  It is a cachexia of the soul when we can no longer hear the song of our hearts.  We all have a path and a unique gift to offer this world. What happens when generations forget the way and their gifts are never realized?

My great desire is to offer women a chance to slow their pace.  Deep in your feminine core is a desire to move with a meticulous nuanced and righteous purpose.  I want you to pause as you look into your sweet baby’s knowing eyes. Stop googling, stop buying all the senseless baby gear, stop charting every feed and bowel movement, and just be.  Be with yourself and be with that baby.  My wish is to help mothers to have a deep knowing from the top of their head to the tip of their toes, that they were born to do this.  They were born to mother. Your baby is looking to you, with those wise knowing eyes, because you have the unique key to unlock healing for your family. Your gifts, your purpose, your wholeness are the solution. 

Please do not misconstrue that I am saying the fate of humanity rests on women’s ability to breastfeed their babies.   Your decision to breastfeed does not matter to me. If you want to breastfeed, I want to help you try.  If you don’t want to breastfeed, I will help you find another way to feed your baby. Even if you do not succeed, I want you to hold the teachings of the your experience trying. Success breastfeeding isn’t my goal for you.

Raging against the our loss of function feels hollow.  Even as we skip further down the path of ecological collapse, I see women stopping mid step.  They pause with a curious furrowing of the brow as if they just remembered something vital but are uncertain what it means.  It is enough. The pause and inevitable pivot away.  We can turn the tide together, one step at a time.  It may not result in successful breastfeeding or even full healing and restoration in our generation or our children’s generation.  But it will mean we are rebuilding. Our salvation starts with one mother at a time.  When she seeks wholeness for herself, the redemption of her life spills into her family, the ripple spreading outward reaching far beyond. If women expand into wholeness with the world following in their wake, the tide will turn. When we remember who we are and how to live concert with the world, breastfeeding will follow.