Painful progress: how evolution muddled human breastfeeding | Science
Have you recently had a baby? Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to go about your new role as a mother.
1. Do what you think is best for you and your baby.
2. Get told you are wrong.
Admittedly, this is adapted from a superior joke made by a friend and occasional guest poster Martha Mills. It’s true though, isn’t it? I’ve made this point before but pregnant women and new mothers are pretty much guaranteed to be judged and found wanting no matter what. You’re in the midst of the most stressful, draining, exhausting process that a human can realistically expect to go through outside of major trauma, and suddenly every one feels they’ve a god-given right to scrutinise your every move. Must be great fun.
This in mind, a recent survey revealed that many women in the UK lack help when it comes to breastfeeding issues, despite promises and efforts to provide exactly that. A bit surprising maybe, seeing as how breastfeeding is an important and much-discussed topic.
As an adult man, I will never breastfeed a baby. But my wife breastfed both our children, and it wasn’t easy for her; a difficult birth resulting in long-lasting consequences with our eldest meant she was physically compromised for the first months of his life. But she still breastfed. I pitched in wherever I could, but with a growing sense of exhausted frustration, purely because I could do nothing to fix it.
She was obviously enduring far worse than me though â€" I want to make that clear.
We eventually got a visit from a breastfeeding expert (which we’d requested), a stern older woman who, despite clearly knowing her stuff, was clearly a breastfeeding evangelist. Her diatribe about how awful it is that some women don’t breastfeed â€" “Rats do it, dogs do it, but we’re the only animal that won’t feed our young†â€" was too much for me. If my wife had been experiencing postnatal depression or similar, this could have been devastating.
I’m not an aggressive guy. But I’ve never come closer to throwing someone out of my home.
I’m not questioning that breastfeeding is the best option. Study after study after study has revealed the numerous health benefits and long-term advantages a breastfed child will end up with. And yes, that’s it’s something we’ve evolved to do â€" the “natural†approach.
But something being natural does not make it easy. Many seem to think that all a new mother has to do is plug the nipple into the baby, like a USB stick. The reality is significantly more complicated. Breastfeeding is tricky and demanding: every baby is different, and the effort involved can be substantial. As can the unpleasant effects: cracked and bleeding nipples, blocked ducts, abscesses, and so much more. All are depressingly common. And that’s without taking into account things like medication, illnesses and injuries. Breastfeeding may be natural, but then so is running, and that’s hardly without effort or consequence.
You might, like me and my wife’s breastfeeding guru, wonder why humans can’t manage it if rats can? It’s often because our babies are so helpless. Litters of new-born cats or dogs are always seen fumbling around, crawling over each other trying to get to mother’s milk. Can you imagine human babies doing that? We celebrate the first time they can even lift their heads up unaided.
And babies’ heads may indeed be the reason they’re so helpless and vulnerable. Humans are bipeds â€" we stand upright â€" which means our pelvises have evolved to be as narrow as possible. However our brains, and therefore our skulls, are substantially bigger than our size would suggest. A woman giving birth needs to have a pelvis as wide as possible to fit our swollen-headed babies through undamaged. This has direct consequences for the reproductive process. So there’s a trade-off: human babies are born at an earlier stage of development compared with most species, meaning they’re far more helpless.
There are competing theories about this, but the point is that most other species’ young can do a lot more of the work when it comes to feeding. Human babies can latch, but not much else, so the mother has to essentially do everything. Sometimes that’s totally fine. Other times it’s like trying to insert a water balloon into a wine bottle. A soft, constantly moving, unfathomably precious wine bottle that eventually grows teeth. And the water balloon is incredibly sensitive. And you have to do this a dozen times a day. Even when you’re meant to be sleeping.
It may be natural, but breastfeeding isn’t as easy a process for humans as it is for other species. That’s seemingly the price of our intellectual advancement. But, as is usually the case, this price is largely being paid by vulnerable women.
It may be true that breast is best, and in ideal world new mothers would try breastfeeding first, if it was a viable option. But sometimes it won’t be, for whatever reason. And if it is viable, it could still be difficult. And that’s why help and alternatives should be made available. If there’s one thing that defines humanity, it’s our tendency to look at nature and say: “You know what? We can do better.†There shouldn’t be any issue with applying this to new mothers, who often need our help the most.
Dean Burnett’s book The Idiot Brain is released in paperback in the USA on 11 July.
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