Baby Food.(breast milk feeding)

There are some new rules governing what used to be called "mother's milk," or "breast milk," including one about what to call it when it's no longer in a mother's breast. A term, then, nomenclatural: "expressed human milk" is milk that has been pressed, squeezed, or sucked out of a woman's breast by hand or by machine and stored in a bottle or, for freezing, in a plastic bag secured with a twist tie. Matters, regulatory: Can a woman carry containers of her own milk on an airplane? Before the summer of 2007, not more than three ounces, because the Transportation Security Administration classed human milk with shampoo, toothpaste, and Gatorade, until a Minneapolis woman heading home after a business trip was reduced to tears when a security guard at LaGuardia poured a two-day supply of her milk into a garbage bin. Dr. Ruth Lawrence, of the breast-feeding committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, promptly told the press, "She needs every drop of that precious golden fluid for her baby"; lactivists, who often stage "nurse-ins," sent petitions; and the T.S.A. eventually reclassified human milk as "liquid medication." Can a woman sell her milk on eBay? It has been done, and, so far, with no more consequence than the opprobrium of the blogosphere, at least until the F.D.A. decides to tackle this one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, does provide a fact sheet on "What to Do If an Infant or Child Is Mistakenly Fed Another Woman's Expressed Breast Milk," which can happen at day-care centers where fridges are full of bags of milk, labelled in smudgeable ink. (The C.D.C. advises that a switch "should be treated just as if an accidental exposure to other bodily fluids had occurred.") During a nine-hour exam, can a woman take a break to express the milk uncomfortably filling her breasts? No, because the Americans with Disabilities Act does not consider lactation to be a disability. Can a human-milk bank pay a woman for her milk? (Milk banks provide hospitals with pasteurized human milk.) No, because doing so would violate the ethical standards of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. If a nursing woman drinks to excess--some alcohol flows from the bloodstream into the mammary glands--can she be charged with child abuse? Hasn't happened yet, but there's been talk. Meanwhile, women who are worried can test a few drops with a product called milkscreen; if the alcohol level is too high, you're supposed to wait and test again, but the temptation is: pump and dump.

An observation, historical: all this is so new that people are making up the rules as they go along. Before the nineteen-nineties, electric breast pumps, sophisticated pieces of medical equipment, were generally available only in hospitals, where they are used to express milk from women with inverted nipples and from mothers of infants too weak and tiny to suck. Today, breast pumps are such a ubiquitous personal accessory that they're more like cell phones than like catheters. Last July, Stephen Colbert hooked up to a breast pump on "The Colbert Report." In August, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, told People that she has often found herself having to "put down the BlackBerries and pick up the breast pump." Pumps, in short, abound.

A treatise, mercantile: Medela, a Swiss company that has long been a breast-pump industry leader, introduced its first non-hospital, electric-powered, vacuum-operated breast pump in the United States in 1991; five years later it launched the swank Pump In Style. Since then, its sales have quadrupled. The traffic in pumps is brisk, although accurate sales figures are hard to come by, not least because many people buy the top-of-the-line models secondhand. (Manufacturers argue that if you wouldn't buy a used toothbrush you shouldn't buy a used breast pump, but a toothbrush doesn't cost three hundred dollars.) Then, there's the swag. "Baby-friendly" maternity wards that used to send new mothers home with free samples of infant formula now give out manual pumps: plastic, one-breast-at-a-time gizmos that work like a cross between a straw and a bicycle pump. Wal-Mart sells an Evenflo electric pump for less than forty dollars. Philips makes one "featuring new iQ Technology"; the pitch is: the pump's memory chip makes it smart, but the name also plays on dubious claims that human milk raises I.Q. scores. State-of-the-art pumps whose motors, tubes, and freeze packs are wedged into bags disguised to look like black leather Fendi briefcases and Gucci backpacks are a must-have at baby showers; the Medela Pump In Style Advanced Metro model--"the C.E.O. of breast pumps"--costs $329.99 at Target. Medela also sells Pump & Save storage bags and breast shields. (The shield is the plastic part of the contraption that fits over the breast; it looks like a horn of plenty.) Medela's no-hands model can be powered by your car's cigarette lighter. Strenuous motherhood is de rigueur. Duck into the ladies' room at a conference of, say, professors and chances are you'll find a flock of women with matching "briefcases," waiting, none too patiently and, trust me, more than a little sheepishly, for a turn with the electric outlet. Pumps come with plastic sleeves, like the sleeves in a man's wallet, into which a mother is supposed to slip a photograph of her baby, because, Pavlov-like, looking at the picture aids "let-down," the release of milk normally triggered by the presence of the baby, its touch, its cry. Staring at that picture when your baby is miles away, well, it can make you cry, too. Pumping is no fun--whether it's more boring or more lonesome I find hard to say--but it has recently become so common that even some women who are home with their babies all day long express their milk and feed it in a bottle. Behind closed doors, the nation begins to look like a giant human dairy farm.

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.

In 1735, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus first sorted out the animal kingdom, he classed humans in a category called Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts. Even those of Linnaeus's contemporaries who conceded the animality of man averred that people have two feet, not four. Ah, but hands are just feet that can grip, Linnaeus countered. This proved unpersuasive. By 1758, in a process that the Stanford historian of science Londa Schiebinger has reconstructed, Linnaeus had abandoned Quadrupedia in favor of a word that he made up, Mammalia: animals with milk-producing nipples. (The Latin root, mamma, meaning breast, teat, or udder, is closely related to the onomatopoeic mama--"mother"--thought to derive from the sound that a baby makes while suckling.) As categories go, "mammal" is an improvement over "quadruped," especially if you're thinking about what we have in common with whales. But, for a while, at least, it was deemed scandalously erotic. (Linnaeus's classification of plants based on their reproductive organs, stamens and pistils, fell prey to a similar attack. "Loathsome harlotry," one botanist called it.) More important, the name falls something short of capacious: only female mammals lactate; males, strictly speaking, are not mammals. Plenty of other features distinguish mammals from Linnaeus's five other animal classes--birds, amphibians, fish, insects, and worms. (Tetracoilia, animals with a four-chambered heart, proposed by a contemporary of Linnaeus's, the Scottish surgeon John Hunter, was at least as good an idea.) Linnaeus had his reasons. Naysayers might doubt that humans are essentially four-footed (whether on scriptural or arithmetic grounds), but no man born of woman, he figured, would dare deny that he was nourished by mother's milk.

Then, too, while Linnaeus was revising his "Systema Naturae" from the twelve-page pamphlet that he published in 1735 to the two-thousand-page opus of 1758--and abandoning Quadrupedia in favor of Mammalia--his wife was, not irrelevantly, lactating. Between 1741 and 1757, she bore and nursed seven children. Her husband, meanwhile, lectured and campaigned against the widespread custom of wet-nursing. The practice is ancient; contracts for wet nurses have been found on scrolls in Babylonia. A very small number of women can't breast-feed, and wet nurses also save the lives of infants whose mothers die in childbirth. But, in Linnaeus's time, extraordinary numbers of European mothers--as many as ninety per cent of Parisian women--refused to breast-feed their babies and hired servants to do the work. In 1752, Linnaeus wrote a treatise entitled "Step Nurse," declaring wet-nursing a crime against nature. Even the fiercest beasts nurse their young, with the utmost tenderness; surely women who resisted their mammalian destiny were to be ranked as lowlier than the lowliest brute.

Enlightenment doctors, philosophers, and legislators agreed: women should nurse their children. In "Emile" (1762), Rousseau prophesied, "When mothers deign to nurse their own children, then morals will reform themselves." (Voltaire had a quibble or two about Rousseau's own morals: the author of "Emile" had abandoned his five illegitimate children at birth, depositing them at a foundling hospital.) "There is no nurse like a mother," Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1785, after discovering an infant-mortality rate of eighty-five per cent at the foundling hospital in Paris that relied on wet nurses (the hospital where Rousseau's children all but certainly died), a discovery that explains why Franklin, in his autobiography, went to the trouble of remarking of his own mother, "She suckled all her 10 Children." But wet nurses were not nearly as common in Colonial America as they were in eighteenth-century Europe. "Suckle your Infant your Self if you can," Cotton Mather commanded from the pulpit. Puritans found milk divine: even the Good Book gave suck. "Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments" was the title of a popular catechism. By the end of the eighteenth century, breast-feeding had come to seem an act of citizenship. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), scoffed that a mother who "neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen." The following year, the French National Convention ruled that women who employed wet nurses could not apply for state aid; not long afterward, Prussia made breast-feeding a legal requirement.