Lessons in feminism from a breastfeeding room

Many women who are new to motherhood are aware that there is an intense conflict among them regarding a very precious resource: mother’s milk. On one hand, there’s the breastfeeding-only team, which defends the body’s milk as the only proper food for babies. In the other corner, the team that says formula sold in pharmacies and supermarkets is very good these days, full of essential nutrients, and available for those who cannot, or don’t want to, breastfeed. It wouldn’t matter what these teams do in the comfort of their homes if it weren’t for the fact that both sides accuse the other of being bad mothers, for not breastfeeding or for breastfeeding too long. Moms just can’t win.

I came to motherhood without much interest in choosing a side in this debate, I just wanted to go unnoticed while I figured out which milk was better suited for me and my baby. But when my son was born in September, he had some health problems that forced us to stay in the clinic for 28 days (happily, he’s now OK). There, I found an ideal place for orchestrating a ceasefire in the milk fight: the hospital’s breastfeeding room.

Let me describe it to you. There were five chairs in a white room, each one with its own pump on one side, where new mothers sit with small glass bottles to save the milk that they pump. That which is pumped is then left in a window to be brought by the nurses to each incubator or cradle. Some pump liters and others barely pump drops. Use of cellphones is not allowed, which invites conversation, and there is much to talk about in this scenario: a group of women with their tits out, some of them trying to make us laugh, others with eyes swollen from crying with worry over their little ones. No one imagines beginning one’s time as mother in front of an incubator.

Most importantly: there, no one is worried over the milk war. There, no milk has superpowers. The fight over milk is a fight conducted via tweets and blogs, somewhere far away. Here, we all just gave birth, had a Cesarean, there is no time for fighting. Here, priority goes to whether the babies have an appetite, that they fatten up, that they do not suffer, that they get stronger. The formula milk is doing the little one good? Stupendous, may they enjoy it. She got mastitis during her first days of breastfeeding? Let her rest. She’s too depressed to lactate? Easy, we can talk about it, let me give her a hug.

One afternoon I found one of my new friend-mothers crying because she couldn’t produce enough milk for her first son. Maybe it was the stress, maybe it was because she couldn’t drink enough water while she was in the newborn unit, or maybe it was simply a mystery of biology. But she calmed down when she realized that neither the doctors nor the nurses nor anyone else was worried due to this slow production, because her little one was feeding perfectly well on formula.

I call the clinic’s breastfeeding room a site of ceasefire because no one spoke in accusatory tones: we shared, we listened, and we showed respect. “Don’t compare,” a nurse asked of us when we noted that some women were producing more milk than others. I would say that this place helped me in one of the hardest moments of my life because, as with other issues we women face, an empathetic group of friends who listen to you without judgement can get you out of the worst holes.

I don’t want to trivialize a debate that has good arguments on both sides: that breastfeeding can slightly reduce the probability of getting breast cancer; that formula allows for more independence among working moms; that suckling on a nipple strengthens the baby’s jaw muscles; that formula allows fathers to be more involved in the feeding of their little ones during the first month. There is no scientific evidence, at any rate, that confirms that the children of a certain milk are more intelligent or healthier in the long run. There are a lot of myths about super milk that must be diffused.

It’s more moving to see that, while there is no superheroine milk, there is a diverse array of milks. In the clinic, seeing the little flasks of freshly pumped milk, some of them full, some containing mere drops, you could tell that the color of each milk was different, and seeing all the bottles together was touching: like paying witness to the multiple shades of what it is to be a woman. We are all different at the end of the day, but all milks are the same: they provide nutrition and give life.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition