Is Breastfeeding Worth It?

The answer isn't always yes, and that's okay.

Imagine a job that required you to work a half-hour to hour-long shift every two to four hours, around the clock, with no days off. Imagine that if you tried to do the job in public, you would be chastised by some and lasciviously gawked at by others. What if this job exposed you to the possibility of pain and serious infection? Oh, and if, for whatever reason, you're not interested in the job or not able to take it and hold onto it for at least a year, you will be told you're a selfish asshole by random people. Even "success" at the job can devastate you psychologically. You must provide all your own supplies. You are lucky to have this job, and if you don't see that, you're ungrateful. It pays $0.

That's breastfeeding.

One night not too long ago, at the same time that bars were announcing last call, I was sitting upright in bed, a baby attached to my breast, pounding yet another can of pamplemousse LaCroix because breastfeeding dehydrates the shit out of me and struggling to keep my eyes open so that I didn't keel over and break said baby, and I thought: this is a lot. Like so many things about motherhood, I did not grasp how much this would be until I was in it.

Pregnancy is already a lot. Childbirth, also a lot. And now, even after the baby was done physically occupying space inside my body, stealing calcium from my bones and demanding I feed her breakfast pastries several times per week, breastfeeding presented another phase of my body not being mine in a way that felt total.

I can't say I wasn't a little tipped off. A friend of mine with two children told me that breastfeeding creates a tether between mother and baby that prevents her from getting back to "normal" for longer than she may have bargained for. Another woman told me that the pressure to breastfeed would be immense but that I "don't have to do it if I don't fucking want to." My sister warned me that it was "hard," a characterization that I suspect involved some restraint. She didn't want to scare me, but didn't want me to be taken by surprise.

The hidden subtext behind the warnings from my friends and family made me wonder if it was common to have complicated unspoken feelings about the act of breastfeeding. And so I made a simple survey and distributed it over my Instagram stories, just to get a sense of it.

As I mentioned the other week, I received an overwhelming number of responses. (Seriously, it took me over a month to read through all of them and organize them in a way that made sense. I emerged with a new respect for academics. This is why I quit going to school after undergrad and will probably never go back.)

One thing is clear: for many parents, especially mothers, there's a disparity between breastfeeding expectations versus breastfeeding reality. Many people felt as though the messaging implied that breastfeeding would come easily, but the reality was that it was a complicated and learned task for both mother and baby. Others felt their physical and mental needs were steamrolled by a patriarchal medical establishment, that maternal well-being was ignored in the pursuit of feeding a child by breast. Some mothers have lingering trauma from their breastfeeding experience, some feel their first days or weeks with their newborn were clouded with anxiety about breastfeeding. Many were taken aback by how much time and energy it requires.

And some mothers loved it and would do it over again in a second.

So, onto the truth about breastfeeding and the big question that we're not supposed to ask: Is it worth it?

Even before I was pregnant I knew that breastfeeding has some appealing benefits. Mothers everywhere are told that it's the best option for their babies, that they should "at least try it," that it's "free," that it's "natural."

Here's a general summary of what expecting mothers are told, based on the pile of responses I got:

Breast milk is engineered by nature to be the ideal food for human infants. Breastfeeding transfers antibodies from mother to child; in the age of COVID, children too young to be vaccinated can receive some protection from the milk of their vaccinated mothers. Breastfeeding is free! Breastfeeding will keep your baby from being sick. Breast milk reduces the risk of SIDS. Breastfeeding helps you lose the baby weight. Breastfed babies do better in school and are less likely to become obese as children. Breastfeeding helps with postpartum depression and anxiety. Breast milk will make your baby smarter. Breastfeeding reduces cancer risk in mothers. Breastmilk is basically magic. Breast is best.

Some of that is true. Some of that is true-ish. Some of that is false or overstated, but people bandy it about anyway because it has been repeated so much that it's become a part of popular superstition, like the myth that girl babies "steal the beauty" from the mother or that raising boys is "easier" than raising girls (Maybe you just didn't try as hard to raise your boys, Debbie, which explains why they're 32 years old and can't do their own laundry.)

The resulting pressure can be immense and overwhelming, and can put mothers in a position where their intimate personal choices become the subject of unwelcome public debate, and the cause of intense guilt. Many women report feeling devastated when it didn't work out the way they hoped it would, like they'd failed.

Jamie, a 37-year-old mother from Seattle, put it this way. "I got the sense from the lactation consultants that many women are wildly stressed and determined to breast feed, that their whole identity and felt sense of motherhood is tied to it."

Missing from the discussion of breastfeeding is the possible cost and who shoulders it-- it's "free" if the breastfeeding mother has no challenges with supply or latch and is able to devote herself to it nearly full-time. But for the rest of us, it's not free.

In most cases, breastfeeding is less fiscally expensive than formula feeding. But there are monetary expenses. Health insurance covers the cost of a pump, but it doesn't cover the cost of the bottles in which the pumped milk is stored temporarily, the freezer bags for long-term storage, coolers for transporting the milk, nursing bras, or pumping bras. The milk is free, but we've still gotta buy the cow.

Beth, who gave birth to a daughter at 2014, says she doesn't remember reading about all of the little costs associated with most realistic breastfeeding scenarios. "You end up spending money on breast pads and nipple cream and in my case, fenugreek supplements and brewer’s yeast (to make lactation cookies) and I’m probably forgetting other stuff I threw money at to try and increase supply or even just to make it easier on myself," Beth says. "I even bought a second pump so I wouldn’t have to lug mine back and forth to work- I was pumping at night at home too because my supply sucked after I returned to work." Beth ended up feeding her daughter with a combination of formula and breast milk. Also not free.

Breastfeeding can take a physical toll. I was always told that "if breastfeeding hurts, you're doing it wrong," but if that's the case, then most women I know were at some point "doing it wrong." Because, even in the best case scenario, it hurts in the beginning. Regular milk takes days to come in, and the colostrum that feeds newborn babies comes out slowly and in tiny amounts, and newborn babies are hungry. Cracked nipples, bleeding nipples, and general intense pain as mother and baby adjust to it is not uncommon. Clogged or infected milk ducts can lead to mastitis, a serious illness, which can lead to abscess, which requires serious medical intervention. There's an array of products on the market to address the havoc breastfeeding can wreak on the human nipple, from cooling gel pads to microwavable donut-shaped beanbags that help with the pain of engorgement-- and, to visit my earlier point, none of these things are free.

"Natural" is not a synonym for "easy," but a lot of us got tricked into thinking it was. (Getting mauled by a polar bear is also "natural.") One of my strangest memories from right after giving birth was a lactation consultant absolutely going to town on my boobs as I sat still numb from the waist down in a wheelchair, completely delirious from only sleeping for an hour and a half of the past 30 or so hours. I just wanted her to leave so that I could sleep and she was mauling my breasts like there were gold in them thar hills.

Lactation consultants' determination to milk the breasts of new mothers can only be matched by their dogged belief that everybody can and should breastfeed.

Kelly, a 34-year-old mother from Wisconsin, said that lactation consultants simply could not wrap their minds around there being something physically preventing her from being able to breastfeed. "I was led to believe I was doing something wrong when I couldn’t produce. It was my pumping technique, the fact that my daughter wouldn’t latch, etc," she says. "They recommended I take supplements (one especially disgusting tincture called Goat’s Rue that tastes exactly how it sounds like it would) and pump more for longer. Pumping 10-12 times only got us one full feeding a day."

I was relieved and surprised when my daughter was able to latch pretty quickly, which meant the lactation consultant left me alone, but my relief turned to slight dismay when I was handed a schedule and told I was to feed her for at least half an hour at a time, every two to three hours, starting--I was reminded several times-- at the beginning of the hour. So if I fed her from 12-12:30, the latest I could start feeding her again was 3 pm. Which meant that, best case scenario, I had two and a half hours tops between every feeding to do all of the other things I might want to do after giving birth, like sleep, use the bathroom whilst spraying my ravaged taint with room temperature water and trying not to scream, eat, brush my teeth, shower, provide text updates for loved ones, etc. But it was never best case scenario. The baby usually wanted to eat for longer than half an hour, and she usually wanted to eat more frequently. Sometimes, I had a fifteen minute break before she'd want to eat again. I was doing everything right and it hurt.

So many expectations around motherhood assume that the mother's time both has no value and is priceless. Breastfeeding is incredibly time-consuming. Until I was doing it myself, I had not thought deeply enough about it to really grasp what it would feel like to be feeding, pumping, or burping every few hours, around the clock until I'm done with it six months to a year in. It is a massive fucking time commitment. Mothers can spend anywhere from a few hours per day to six or more hours per day on it.

And then there's the emotional toll-- the one that gets discussed the least but seems to have the biggest bearing on whether or not breastfeeding is worth it for a particular mother.

Some sexual abuse survivors say the incessant push to breastfeed was painful for them. The found the act traumatizing. Nobody is served by forcing a new mom into more anxiety and panic than she's already feeling. Some people simply do not want to breastfeed for their own reasons and don't need to be told they're selfish for it.

Whether breastfeeding is worth it depends

Can breastfeeding be simple? Positive? Nice? Absolutely. But it isn't always those things. For some people, it is never those things. And much of the ways in which it is not positive is hidden, under-discussed, or shouted down.

Says Elizabeth, a 39-year-old mother from Utah: "I wish someone had warned me how badly it could hurt when my milk came in, and how painful engorgement feels. I wish someone had warned me that every lactation consultant has a radically different approach so you’re never sure what to do even when you ask literally all the questions. I wish I’d known what a royal pain in the ass pumping would be. I wish I’d known the amount of guilt that would blanket me when I couldn’t initially produce enough for my baby’s needs. And I wish someone had told me that once my breasts were used as a food source, they’d essentially cease to be a part of my sexual body in any way I recognize."

The question of whether or not breastfeeding is worth the time, physical toll, and stress is a question that every individual mother should answer for herself. But the time, physical toll, and stress of breastfeeding should not be a mystery. Nobody should be coerced into breastfeeding from a position of ignorance; she should be spoken to honestly, openly, and like an adult who can handle making a decision for herself and her family.

So much about pregnancy and motherhood is painted over with pastel obfuscation, because the popular assumption seems to be that if mothers knew the truth, it would scare us away from doing the right thing for our respective families. It's so patronizing. Give it to us straight. It's the least we deserve.

The best case scenario for a baby is fed, and being cared for by parents who are mentally and physically as healthy as possible. If a mother decides that breastfeeding isn't worth it for her, that's fine. It was the best choice for me. But it wasn't easy and it wasn't free, and it's not the best choice for everybody. And if it isn't the best choice for somebody else, they don't owe anybody an explanation.

Original illustration by Amanda Penley.