Breast or Bottle?

Amy Koerber

Description

Breast or Bottle? is the first scholarly examination of the shift in breastfeeding recommendations occurring over the last half century. Through a close analysis of scientific and medical controversies and a critical examination of the ways in which medical beliefs are communicated to the public, Amy Koerber exposes layers of shifting arguments and meaning that inform contemporary infant-feeding advocacy and policy.

Whereas the phrase "breast or bottle" might once have implied a choice between two relative equals, human milk is now believed to possess unique health-promoting qualities. Although it is tempting to view this revision in medical thinking as solely the result of scientific progress, Koerber argues that a progress-based interpretation is incomplete. Epidemiologic evidence demonstrating the health benefits of human milk has grown in recent years, but the story of why these forms of evidence have dramatically increased in recent decades, Koerber reveals, is a tale of the dedicated individuals, coalitions, and organizations engaged in relentless rhetorical efforts to improve our scientific explanations and cultural appreciation of human milk, lactation, and breastfeeding in the context of a historical tendency to devalue these distinctly female aspects of the human body. Koerber demonstrates that the rhetoric used to promote breastfeeding at a given time and cultural moment not only reflects a preexisting reality but also shapes the infant-feeding experience for new mothers.

Koerber's claims are grounded in extensive rhetorical research including textual analysis, archival research, and interviews with key stakeholders in the breastfeeding controversy. Her approach offers a vital counterpoint to other feminist analyses of the shift toward probreastfeeding scientific discourse and presents a revealing rhetorical case study in the complex relationship between scientific data and its impact on medical policy and practices. The resulting interdisciplinary study will be of keen interest to scholars and students of rhetoric, communication, women's studies, medical humanities, and public health as well as medical practitioners and policymakers.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Breastfeeding
• With Women
• Lactation consultant
• Maternal health
• Pregnancy
• Assisted reproductive technology
• Breast milk
• Natural childbirth
• Mammary gland
• Wet nurse
• Breast pump
• Baby bottle
• Nipple
• Childbirth
• Infant formula
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Midwifery
• Milk
• Donna Haraway
• Lactation

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172461
• Langue: English

Extrait

Breast or Bottle?
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
Breast or Bottle?
.....................................................................................................
Contemporary Controversies in Infant Feeding Policy and Practice
.....................................................................................................
Amy Koerber

The University of South Carolina Press
2013 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Koerber, Amy (Amy Lunn)
Breast or bottle? : contemporary controversies in infant-feeding policy and practice / Amy Koerber.
pages cm.-(Studies in rhetoric/communication)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-241-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-1-61117-246-1 (epub) 1. Infants-Nutrition. 2. Breastfeeding. 3. Bottle feeding.
I. Title.
RJ 216. K 593 2013
649 .33- DC 23 2013007824
photograph of baby bottle istockphoto.com/Ljupco
For Anne Berger, in loving memory
S OCRATES : That is just what surprises me, Gorgias, and has made me ask you all this time what in the world the power of rhetoric can be. For, viewed in this light, its greatness comes over me as something supernatural.
G ORGIAS : Ah yes, if you knew all, Socrates,-how it comprises in itself practically all powers at once! And I will tell you a striking proof of this: many and many a time have I gone with my brother or other doctors to visit one of their patients, and found him unwilling either to take medicine or submit to the surgeon s knife or cautery; and when the doctor failed to persuade him I succeeded, by no other art than that of rhetoric. So great, so strange, is the power of this art.
P LATO , Gorgias, circa 386 B . C . E .
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1
Infant Feeding and Rhetoric
An Overview
2
From Wives Tales and Folklore to Scientific Fact
Rhetorics of Breastfeeding and Immunity in the Mid-Twentieth Century
3
Articulating Knowledge and Practice
The Rhetoric of Infant-Feeding Policy
4
Viral Rhetoric
Breast and Bottle in Current Promotional Discourse
5
Rhetorical Agency and Resistance in the Context of Infant Feeding
6
Feminism, Rhetoric, and Breastfeeding
Some Concluding Remarks
Appendix: Research Participants
Notes
References
Index
Series Editor s Preface
Amy Koerber writes that scientific evidence in recent decades strongly supports the value of infant breastfeeding because of its profound benefits in strengthening the human immune system. This support has been a major shift in the public framing of scientific thinking. And yet, she argues in Breast or Bottle? Contemporary Controversies in Infant Feeding Policy and Practice , the shift in scientific thinking itself and the larger social discussion of infant-feeding practices, was preceded and continues to be strongly influenced by a variety of rhetorical currents. Promotion of and resistance to breastfeeding, with entailments in feminist and scientific discourse, have a complex history, a history complicated by the commercial interest in bottle feeding. Koerber explores the rhetoric of these discourses as they appear in research articles, advice literature, and policy documents. A rich series of interviews, conducted over a period of ten years with mothers, consultants, advocates, and medical authorities, brings context and perspective to this textual analysis.
Professor Koerber shows how, even when, midcentury medical experts supported breastfeeding as a foundation, they often understood breastfeeding as a model for the development of a commercially manufactured, testable, controllable, bottled baby milk based on cow s milk, with the guiding assumption that nutrition science could produce a commercial milk equivalent to, or even superior to, human milk. By the late twentieth century, it became more common to argue for the unique benefits of human milk for infant feeding. Earlier, breastfeeding had been the foundation; in an emerging formulation, breastfeeding was advocated as the norm, with the consequence of introducing a polarizing debate centering on the possible risks of bottle feeding. Professor Koerber s study of the commonplaces invoked by advocates shows how strongly medical and scientific discourse have been flavored by larger cultural shifts and how advocates and mothers themselves frame their views as invocations of science. At the same time, feminist advocates and the society at large have not come to terms with what it would mean for twenty-first century American mothers to breastfeed their babies. The rhetorical history offered in Breast or Bottle? is an important contribution to our understanding of the role of science in public-policy rhetoric and of the surprising turns in just half a century in the way we talk about a fundamental human practice. Koerber s study makes visible the structures of this talk and calls for a renewed feminist discourse on breastfeeding.
Acknowledgments
Although it seems like a long time ago, acknowledgments for this project extend all the way back to my dissertation at the University of Minnesota. In writing the dissertation, I benefited greatly from mentoring and writing guidance from my advisor Mary Lay Schuster and from committee members Laura Gurak, Arthur Walzer, and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. These are the people who taught me how to think like a rhetorician, a habit I ve never been able to break.
Since joining the faculty at Texas Tech University in 2002, I have received generous financial support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the EXPORT Center for Rural Health, and the School of Nursing. Such support has paid for graduate research assistants, travel to Elk Grove, Illinois, to conduct archival research at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) headquarters, technology needs, and a faculty development leave in Fall 2009 that allowed me to finish an early version of this manuscript. I have enjoyed many conversations with Texas Tech colleagues over the years and am especially grateful for publishing advice offered by Sam Dragga and mentoring from Laura Beard. I have discussed infant feeding at great length with Linda Brice and Elizabeth Tombs from the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Anita Thigpen Perry School of Nursing and enjoyed having them as co-investigators in the focus-group research that informs some of this book s arguments. I have received excellent research assistance at various stages from Tamra Cumbie, Ryan Hoover, and Lonie McMichael. Although there are too many to name each one individually, I am also grateful to all the students who have enrolled in my graduate seminar in medical rhetoric over the years; the discussions in this class have contributed more to this book than these students will ever know.
I am thankful to the many women and men who participated in interview and focus-group research over the years. Although these participants must remain anonymous, I hope I have adequately and fairly recounted the stories they have told and that the resulting knowledge will benefit others who might encounter situations similar to those that the research participants have so generously shared. I am also thankful to John Zwicky, archivist at the American Academy of Pediatrics History Center, and the staff at the Bakwin Library at AAP headquarters. These individuals also made it possible for me to visit the AAP headquarters and conduct archival research that has added important historical detail to many of the arguments presented in this book.
Since the moment I first considered submitting a proposal to University of South Carolina Press, I have received wonderful support and guidance from Jim Denton, acquisitions editor. Everyone at the press has been delightful to work with, and I have appreciated their clear guidance and responsiveness at every step of the way. I also received valuable feedback from Bernice L. Hausman and another, anonymous manuscript reviewer. I am also thankful to Dr. Lawrence Gartner, who participated in two telephone interviews and offered critical feedback on an early version of the manuscript. For scholarly inspiration and support, I am especially grateful to Judy Segal, who encouraged me at a time when I really needed it and whose work continues to remind me how great are the powers of rhetoric.
I am grateful to my father, who taught me the value of a good argument and was one of the first to give me critical feedback on my writing. My mother and father paid for my college education and enabled me to follow my dreams, even when those dreams did not seem so practical. I hope I can do the same for my own children.
I would have never thought of this project if not for long conversations I had with my mother, Gayle Backes, and her mother, Anne Berger, about the not-so-distant history of infant-feeding practices and recommendations in the United States. Both women breastfed their babies before it was sanctioned by medical experts and in times when it was not fashionable to do so. When my grandmother nursed her babies in the 1940s, she had to hide the practice from her pediatrician. She passed away early in 2011, and this book is dedicated to her loving memory.
And, finally, I have discovered along the way that writing books is a lot like raising children: both jobs require a lot more work than you envision at the outset, but they are also more rewarding than anyone could ever imagine. Most i