Breastfeeding as a Moral Imperative: An Autoethnographic Study

Abstract

In recent years, breastfeeding has been heavily promoted in the UK. This has been partly premised on the health benefits for women and infants, but there has also been a strong rhetoric of `the natural' that has surrounded childbirth practices more generally. Some feminist thought has been influential in promoting breastfeeding as a way of `resisting' the medicalization of childbirth and motherhood, associating it with women's personal agency and empowerment. Despite the strong cultural pressure to breastfeed, however, many women `fail' to do so, with only 25 percent of women in the UK breastfeeding exclusively when the infant is four months old. Recent research has begun to look at the negative psychological and emotional effects experienced by women in the light of this `failure'. Exploring these issues further, this article uses an autoethnographic approach and utilizes sociological concepts such as the `body-project' to illustrate how the act of breastfeeding can be fraught with tension as contradictory pressures in contemporary society pull women in various ways. The article concludes that, far from being an `empowering' act, breastfeeding may have become more of a `normalized' moral imperative that many women experience as anything but liberational. Accordingly, an uncritical appropriation of the idea that `breast is best' may not only be disempowering for women, but also problematic for babies.