Diana Pelse

“The fact that the USA and some other countries have had to bring in laws to ‘allow’ women to breastfeed in public places illustrates the severity of the problem. I believe that not only is it a woman’s right to respond to her baby’s urgent need whenever and wherever it is necessary, but that public breastfeeding is essential to provide a model of normality. It is ludicrous that anxious new mothers pore over books and websites in order to try and breastfeed ‘in the correct way’! Where breastfeeding is a normal everyday event women have fewer problems than in societies where it is concealed.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“To this day ‘insufficient milk’ is the commonest reason that women give for abandoning breastfeeding. This is more common in societies where free access to the breast is socially deplored. Ironically, an idea that evolved from a fear of a non-existent problem (there has never been any good evidence showing the ill effects of too much breastfeeding) led to the establishment of a real problem.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“Modern reaction to wet nursing has sometimes been condemning of the rich family who may have risked the wet nurse’s child’s welfare in the interest of their own baby’s welfare. I see little difference between this and the fact that devoted middle-class parents in Europe and North America use a whole range of consumer goods, from baby clothes to toys and equipment, which are produced in the low-wage economies of Asian, African and Latin American countries. Many of the practical conveniences of our lives, from our clothes to the washing machine, are produced through the insecure and low-paid labour of women in the global economy who may forego breastfeeding their children to do it.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“When babies are fed at prescribed intervals and their time at the breast curtailed, then the wonderful dance that the bodies of a mother and her baby have spent nine months rehearsing cannot be performed. The process gets disrupted and may shut down. That is why so-called ‘insufficient milk syndrome’ increased as medicalised maternity services became established.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business