Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Got Breastmilk?

"This makes it all the more worrying that the evolving rules governing human milk, including the proposed Breastfeeding Promotion Act of 2007, look a muddle. They indulge in a nomenclatural sleight of hand, conflating 'breastfeeding' and 'feeding human milk.' They are purblind, unwilling to eye whether it’s his mother or her milk that matters more to a baby. They suffer from a category error. Is human milk an elixir, a commodity, a right? The question is, at heart, taxonomical. And it has been asked before."

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker traces the history of, and current controversies surrounding, breastfeeding.

And Emily Bazelon in The New York Times notes the death in 2008 of Edwina Froehlich, co-founder of La Leche League.

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