Best for Whom? Experiences of Breastfeeding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Breast is best’ is the ubiquitous refrain that apparently captures state and public attitudes towards breastfeeding. However, as any media report of breastfeeding in public indicates, support for breastfeeding is far more fickle than such a slogan suggests. This contradiction between vociferous promotion and perpetual controversy does not prevent the close association between breastfeeding and good mothering, nor does it deter women from assessing their parenting against its parameters. With varying degrees of individual ‘success’, all of the women interviewed for this project expressed broad support for breastfeeding and described it as the normative practice of the good mother. This chapter examines this support for breastfeeding and the tensions it creates for women as they invoke the language of ‘nature’ to justify its superiority, account for breastfeeding ‘failures’ and risk breastfeeding for ‘too long’. That these are the themes that frame the women's experiences of breastfeeding is evidence of the diversity of socioeconomic circumstances that comprise this small sample (five described themselves as working-class and a further two reported “working-class backgrounds”) and the complex conclusions about black motherhood that may be gleaned from their narratives. My intention here is to expand the predominant thinking around black women's breastfeeding experiences beyond claims that they reject breastfeeding for its risky proximity to nature (Blum, 1999) or that those women who embrace breastfeeding do so in acquiescence to white, middle-class norms (as suggested by Forna, 2000). The mothers I interviewed had different experiences with breastfeeding but each began from the premise that ‘breast is best’. Their negotiation of this discourse was framed by their broader ideas about what constitutes good parenting and how such parenting is made possible by access to economic resources, and their disgust or reverence (depending on their attitudes towards AP) for breastfeeding beyond babyhood. This chapter considers these negotiations in greater detail. As previous chapters have outlined, concern with breastfeeding has been a feature of state and public interest in the UK and Canada since at least 1900 (Carter, 1995; Baillargeon, 2009; Nathoo and Ostry, 2009). Independent of its association with AP, breastfeeding attracts a great deal of attention due to its many ascribed benefits and transformative capacities. Acknowledged by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) as the ‘crucial food for children's health and development’ (UNICEF, 2017), efforts to promote breastfeeding have taken on greater significance in recent years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".