Giving breastmilk: Body ethics and contemporary breastfeeding practice [Book Review]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rhonda Shaw and Alison Bartlett (eds.) (2010) Giving Breastmilk: Body Ethics and Contemporary Breastfeeding Practice. Toronto: Demete Press.Three things came together when I was asked to review this book. Time magazine courted controversy by showing a mother breastfeeding her three- year-old son with the caption, 'Are you mom enough?' 1. A breastfeeding woman in a New Zealand cafe was offered a tea-towel and asked to cover up because she was offending patrons2 . A television advert showing All Black rugby star Piri Weepu bottle-feeding his daughter was banned for fear it would discourage breastfeeding. As a mum who had just stopped breastfeeding her two-year-old daughter, I was at a loss as to how parents can admirably feed their children: certainly not by bottle, judging by the banning of the Piru Weepu advert; certainly not visibly by breast in public, judging by the offense it caused cafe patrons; and certainly not by breast once the baby reaches a certain age, judging by widespread backlash to the Time cover. Exclusively breastfeeding in private until the baby is no more than six months old seems to be the only feeding one can do without evoking protest.It was thus with great academic and personal interest that I began reading Giving Breastmilk. This ambitious anthology brings together 18 chapters from 23 academics, practitioners, and activists. Four men are among the authors, including one man who co-wrote a chapter on wet-nursing in Sudan. Contributors are based in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the US, and topics are focused on these countries, with the exception of Sudan and a chapter on Japanese film.After an engaging introduction, the book is divided into four sections: Making Milk; Sharing Milk; Milk Politics; Milk Theory. The chapters cross- reference each other, giving the book a well-connected feel. Moreover, the threading of ethics and notions of the gift throughout the anthology results in a compilation that feels like an edited collection, rather than 18 separate chapters. It is obvious that careful preparation has gone into this book. I liked also that the bibliography included the full first name of authors. It would have been helpful, though, to have the chapters numbered and for the in-text referencing system to include the date rather than just the author's surname.When I think back on the book a number of chapters come quickly to mind. The first is the chapter by Karleen Gribble on 'Receiving and Enjoying Milk,' where she explores what breastfeeding means to children. Jennifer Reich's entry, 'From Maternal Love to Toxic Exposure: State Interpretations of Breastfeeding Mothers in the Child Welfare System,' has also stayed with me. Reich's account of a child being taken away from her mother because the State considered it a form of child abuse to breastfeed past infancy was heart- wrenching reading. The chapters on women donating breast milk and milk- banking were also intriguing and introduced a topic about which I knew very little.One would expect a book on breastfeeding to be pro-breastfeeding and this book is no exception. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".