The vast majority of new moms try breastfeeding—and if they work, breast pumping too. Professor and author Courtney Jung discusses with Working Mother's Jennifer Owens the difference between the two—and why it matters so much.

Pumping sucks.

Okay, it’s a bad pun, but chances are you’re intimately familiar with the meaning behind it. Pumping can be painful, time-consuming and, let’s face it, a hassle. Even so, studies show that some 79 percent of new moms initiate breastfeeding—and in New York City, where Working Mother is based, it’s 90 percent. In an election season of intense conflict, it’s amazing to think that breastfeeding babies is an issue on which nearly all of us agree.

Yet we didn’t always believe “breast is best”—likely your mother didn’t. So what changed? That’s the question political scientist Courtney Jung sought to answer in her recent book, Lactivism. But it led to many more, revealing that the science behind breast-is-best is at the minimum suspect, while public policy built on the belief could be called questionable. We sat down with the University of Toronto professor to find out what she’s learned.

JENNIFER: What led you to write this book?

COURTNEY: Having my first baby, of course. I was surprised by how much moral fervor there was surrounding breastfeeding. I wasn’t opposed to it at all, but I had never thought about it.

It was 2005, and I thought I should really write about this because there was such a consensus building around breastfeeding among people who agreed about nothing else. But then I was busy. I had a second child in 2011, and things had only grown more extreme in the intervening years. I thought, I really need to write this book.

I was born in 1965. My mother did not breastfeed, nor did any of her friends. She still thinks breastfeeding is kind of gross. So I knew that in the space of 40 years, there had been a total sea change in our attitudes. How do we come to believe what we believe? I started the book with that question.

J: Let’s start with the terminology. We call it breastfeeding—and when I was doing it, I called it breastfeeding. But in actuality, a lot of what I was doing was breast pumping. You note that this distinction is an important one, but why?

C: It’s important for a number of reasons. One is that breast pumping is a particularly American thing. Women are breast pumping, and all of our public policies are about breast pumping—facilitating pumping, making pumping easier, making pumping cheaper. That’s an explicitly American response to the contradiction between six months of exclusive breastfeeding [recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics] and the absence of a federally mandated paid maternity leave.

So there’s a particular reason that we in the United States are pumping instead of breastfeeding. That’s one reason it’s important to draw that distinction and realize what we’re actually doing here. Pumping is compatible with U.S. government policies because it’s business-friendly; it’s all about maintaining a competitive economy and labor force. It’s not primarily a benefit to mothers and children.

That’s the reason it’s important to point a finger at what we’re actually doing in the U.S. Maybe some women will want to continue doing it and some women won’t, but we should at least know what is actually going on here.

J: I think when I was choosing to breastfeed, I was in my own world, not looking any further than my own relationship to my baby and how to find time to pump at work.

C: I know! I don’t think we’ve all sat up and noticed that.

J: Even at Working Mother, we haven’t tied this conversation about breastfeeding versus breast pumping to the fight for paid leave. We also haven’t asked, “Why are we all breast pumping so much rather than breastfeeding?”

C: One reason it’s important to make that distinction is that there’s absolutely no research into whether or not they’re the same thing. If breast- feeding reduces the risk of infection, it’s not at all clear that going through the stages of pumping breast milk, then freezing or refrigerating it, then heating it will reduce the risk of infection, or reduce the risk of infection as much as breastfeeding. I’m not saying it will or it won’t. I’m saying nobody has any idea because nobody—nobody—has done that research. There is no research into whether breastfeeding is the same as feeding a baby human milk from a bottle.

J: Yet why did I want to do it so badly? I was fully committed to breastfeeding my babies and breast pumping because I knew “breast is best.” I wanted to make sure they had the best, especially as a working mom who was going to leave them with a caregiver. I saw it as something I could do to protect my babies when I couldn’t be with them.

C: Probably a lot of that is driven by guilt, as in, “I’ve got to leave my baby to be taken care of by someone else; the least I can do is feed her breast milk.”

J: I breastfed both my babies for a year, but for my daughter I supplemented my milk with formula. And 12 years later, I still hold a bit of guilt that I was able to do better by her younger brother.

C: Oh, no, don’t think that!

J: But where does that guilt come from? I had read that breast milk would protect babies from infection, stave off obesity, develop their brains. It was a magic halo that only I could provide them—which, by the way, fed nicely into my internal dialogue of Mommy is going to keep you safe. But you argue that the research isn’t really there to support that magic halo.

C: It’s pretty alarming. It shocked me. Even as I was figuring out what the book would look like, I did not think there would be a chapter on medical research. I just assumed the medical research was what it was and that I would focus on the question about the moral fervor. It did not occur to me that the medical research was pretty far removed from what I believed. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I really did believe that breast milk and breastfeeding would protect my kid from pretty much everything.