The question actually came up in a blog post on Sunday. My answer outgrew the Link Log.
My answer is, of course, NO. Like starting the baby in the first place, feeding the baby naturally is a personal decision about which only the owner of the body involved has anything to say.
In the blog post linked below, a young Christian, concerned for his baby's health, spirals into a panic he feels able to express only by trying to bark out orders to guide a process he's not even capable of understanding. His angry rant shows how scared, helpless, and shamed he really feels, and how, like a typical male, he thinks trying to turn his real emotions into anger and blaming someone else is "rational" and "manly." If it weren't so likely to lead to violence it would be funny. Manly? The whole post was written by a kicking, screaming inner infant.
He thinks he can tell a woman to lactate? Well, every girl learns, as part of the process of growing up to be a woman, that most of the non-lactating half of humankind are incompetent most of the time. Just a peek at just a fraction of the body part that wields the power they don't have is usually enough to reduce them to drooling idiocy. Women have been pardoning displays of male irrationality, not to mention presumption, even blasphemy (only the Creator ever told anyone's milk to flow), for a long time. Perhaps we shouldn't pardon them so easily. At the very least a man needs to know, before there is any chance of his becoming a father, that since men are incapable of doing any of the actual feeding of a baby, that's an indication that they are meant to do all of the getting up at night to bring the baby to its mother, to return it to the cradle, to fetch clean diapers, and generally to do all the other housework unless, and until, the wife reclaims it. And what men have to say, as they bow in awe before the miracle that is motherhood, needs to be "Humble me, O Lord, so I can do Thy Will."
Reading the Bible as a whole, of course, quells the male fantasy that some of the apostles advised wives generally to submit to their own husbands because that was part of the natural order of things. It was not. It's what many of us actually want, bur, like sunshine, it's not naturally available to even half the people who want it.
Adam was rebuked for obeying his wife immediately after receiving instructions directly from God, and disobeying God. Though Adam's choice was wrong, God's response to it was compassionate, because Adam's obedience to his wife was part of the natural order of things. Abraham was not rebuked for obeying his wife, even though she seems to have been the only one in their family who did not receive guidance directly from God--and was that why she was the one who gave orders to other people? In front of strangers, at least, Sarah showed conventional courtesy to Abraham, addressing him by his title (of which she was no doubt very proud); this was how Jewish Christian wives were told to treat their husbands, though there were probably times when it seemed like mockery to Abraham, who, we are told, obeyed Sarah even when it caused him pain. Then there was Nabal, remembered as "The Fool," which is what the nickname "Nabal" meant, for bawling out bad ideas to servants who had learned that his wife's directions were the ones it was prudent to follow...
Paul advised the wives of Greek and Roman Pagans to submit to their husbands with the sort of "fear" that was proper to the authority their laws granted those husbands. Peter advised Jewish Christian wives to speak politely to their husbands in public, as Sarah did to Abraham. They were talking about how Christians could best approach different cultures, not about what every marriage is meant to be.
The idea that women's liberation from abusive marriage laws could wait is enough to offend some readers today. The idea that men generally are entitled to any position of authority is analogous to the idea that, because Moses was directed to speak to a rock and reveal a spring of water behind it, the general method of finding water should be to go out and talk to rocks. Most men are dumb animals who, if women didn't maintain control of relationships with them, would produce babies they'd never even help to feed. The minute we reposition your hands, boys, the game is over. A man who can represent Christ to his household maintains complete control of himself. No haggling for "more" before marriage. No suggestion of starting babies before the wife feels fully prepared for motherhood. No raising his voice or giving orders, ever. No talking back--a woman's No means No and, if the man thinks there is a chance that she didn't really mean it, he should back off and wait for her to realize that for herself. Men who want respect need to be respectable. Responsible. Honorable, even. And one little moment of Nabalite bluster destroys that; presents the man as no more of a godly leader than the screaming infant is.
But is there some reason to blame a specific person, maybe someone like Gloria Steinem who never dared to be even a foster mother but sets herself up as a career mentor, for discouraging a woman from naturally feeding a baby who is failing to thrive on artificial food? There may be. Still, a godly leader does not squirm around in impotent rage, throwing blame at other people. He says things that are honest and self-respecting, like "Hearing that baby scream that way tears my feelings all to pieces. I know we need the money from your job but, if human milk can make the baby strong and healthy, I don't care what else we have to do without; I don't have to eat every single day," and "I never thought about the possibility that my baby might not live. I feel so helpless I don't know how I can bear it. I don't know what to do to save my son," and "I don't know whether there's a way to reconcile feeding the baby naturally with doing your job, but there ought to be. Maybe someone who knows more about natural child care can help."
If this poor frightened boy ever wants his wife to feel that Christian submission to the likes of him is possible, what he needs to do is exactly what he feels so afraid of doing. He must confess his sin. (Submission to a spirit of selfish egotism, as shown by anyone's demanding his or her own way over anyone else's, is a positive sin too. He sinned by telling her what to do, and she sinned if she gave his infantile bawling any more attention than she gave a bird singing outside the window.) He must confess his shame. (It is a shame for a grown man to demand his own way over anyone else's.) He must confess his helplessness, his confusion, and his fear. (He doesn't know that natural feeding will keep the baby alive, or that artificial food is what's making it sickly. Some children thrive on artificial food. He doesn't say whether his child has been exposed to, e.g., glyphosate vapor drift.)
He must consciously look for ways to identify what he might want, what would be "his way," and to mortify his selfish ego by giving up that--whatever it may be. Months or years need to go by during which he can be seen to be guided entirely by Revelation, or in its absence by Reason, with no regard whatsoever for his preferences. That is the only way anyone can expect to be seen as a leader whom anyone of his own generation has any reason to follow. Christian men are indeed called to the "headship" of their households...and that is, as Lewis observed, the crown of thorns, because they can get it only by self-sacrifice. The husband and father who wants to channel Christ to his wife and children must love them "as Christ also loved us, and died for us."
But why on Earth does the foolish boy imagine that "feminists" ever discouraged natural childbirth or natural childcare? Most people who rail about "feminists," these days, have no idea what they are talking about. A feminist is a person who believes that women are at least equally as valuable as men. That's pretty much a synonym for a rational human being. Needless to say, there is room for a lot of disagreement among feminists.
There have been socialist feminists who thought all women needed to be employed in the service of a totalitarian state, yes. They did not have enough influence, in the United States, to get women strapped down and knocked out and, if possible, carved up by surgeons, to deliver healthy babies, nor to add the anti-lactation injections during the mandatory ten-day hospitalization. Who actually did that was the 1950s incarnation of Big Pharma. In the 1950s the sort of people who have more recently screamed that vaccines were the world's only hope of surviving COVID were screaming that women needed that utterly unnatural, male-directed approach to motherhood...to preserve their beauty! The focal point of 1950s fashion was the perky bosom. There are exactly two ways a woman can fit into 1950s fashions: exercise to maintain muscle tone in her upper body, or wearing 1950s lingerie. Neither of these things was affected by lactation, but apparently a critical mass of Americans, in the 1950s, were clueless enough to think they were, presumably because their mothers thought it wasn't nice to talk about such things with them. Anyway it was very profitable for the doctors and manufacturers concerned, though harmful to the babies.
I don't know whether any of the women who literally had to fight for the right to reclaim control of the natural processes of motherhood would have called themselves feminist activists in the early 1960s. I'm sure the women who were making the most noise, at the time, preferred not to think or talk about those women at all. Women like my mother surely would have made women like Gloria Steinem feel as inadequate as they made them look. Mother didn't need a political movement to "have it all" before that was what other women dared to dream of. She had her own business, with full support from her husband. She could bottle human milk for my brother and me and leave it at home, or take us to the shop, cradle and all, and nurse us in between appointments, as she saw fit. She could also, even as an undiagnosed Irish celiac, work Gloria into the ground before breakfast. She also naturally had the sort of figure poor old Gloria could only say, enviously, "seemed so vulnerable"...to someone who didn't have it. Mother was not asked to lecture to the consciousness-raising groups of that day. Not that she had time for them. She was a La Leche Leader. I think, in historical hindsight, she was a feminist activist.
(Mother, of course, was vulnerable--not in the sense Gloria Steinem had in mind, but as an undiagnosed celiac. After giving birth to my natural sister she was disabled by thyroid failure for the next fifteen years. But in youth, as in old age, she was a real storybook heroine...lovable, too.)
Late baby-boomers grew up aware of our options and so, while choosing not to have babies of my own, I knew how to induce lactation when a friend was having difficulties feeding a baby who didn't tolerate Enfamil. I expected it to feel nice; it did. I expected it to have an effect on my metabolism; I didn't anticipate how dramatic the effect would be. I know firsthand that, while lactating women usually want to do other things besides lactate, nobody has any right to expect that they will.
Women, too, can be deceived by our emotions into thinking we're speaking as wise mentors and elders when we're really venting our vulnerabilities. It can sound like "You're not a cow! This is what scientific progress is all about! You have a right to bottle-feed the baby. Never let anyone at the office notice that you have a baby. No baby stories, no baby pictures, no emergency calls from the person watching the baby, and never let the baby be visible from the office door! In order to deserve equal pay women need to be equally as neglectful of our families and ourselves as men do--to put their careers first."
More confident and competent women, however, say "Wrong. Both men and women need to put their and their families' physical needs ahead of any corporation. The traditional ideal for all parents to be self-employed, negotiating their own terms of employment directly with their customers, is still by far the best. People who want to make a career of being employees should think twice about having babies. Even so, employers need to work with employees as human beings, with bodies--finding work for employees whose physical abilities change, or finding ways to help employees put babies first for the short time that the future generation are babies."
Should Christian women who choose to give birth also choose to feed the baby naturally? It's hard to imagine why they wouldn't--if the choice is available. Human milk is the best food for human babies. Lactation is also the most efficient way for the body to get rid of the surplus fat pregnant women store in places where, if it's not converted into milk, that fat does nothing at all for the baby. Lactation also balances the hormones that, when artificially altered, become involved in postpartum depression. It's empowering; it's a statement of independence from the whole wretched corporate universe. It's also a way of bonding with the baby. (And no, apart from a little temporary increase in top-heaviness, my figure didn't change. It lost its youthful perkiness only after age 50, when I was too sick to eat or exercise for two weeks. The key to a youthful figure is exercise.) And also, although there are no absolute guarantees, lactation is the closest thing we have to "immunization" for breast cancer. Nobody should wait for a baby's health to deteriorate on an artificial diet, or allow herself to be browbeaten by a foolish young husband, to choose natural food for a baby.
In less technologically advanced societies, where men and women define their value to society in terms of hand-to-hand combat, digging coal, and felling trees, and so it's possible for rational people not to be feminists, the historical fact is that many, often most, babies don't survive. If people living in such conditions are able to keep records, their records will show how many more babies were born than children lived to grow up. Women in such societies have no alternative to natural feeding, but that in no way implies that all women produce enough milk or good enough milk to rear strong healthy babies. Many don't, because the usual thing in such societies is that parents are malnourished, themselves. For humans as for other animals, the absence of an overwhelming desire to keep, feed, and cherish babies is often an indication that the babies aren't going to live. (That's one of the reasons why calling abortion murder is so stupid; the mother of a viable fetus will usually guard it with her life, so if a woman can say "I choose abortion" there's a high probability that the abortion is more like euthanasia.) Other family members should not blame a woman who is unwilling, and probably unable, to feed a baby naturally. Whether or not she wanted the baby as much as its father and grandparents did, wanting babies does not guarantee viable babies.
In humans as in other animal families, the baby whose own mother can't feed it may be adopted by another female, may seem to thrive on the natural food for its species, and may then die, just the same, before or after it starts eating solid food. Malnutrition used to be the most common reason for this. Today it's unusual for anyone to be malnourished due to simple lack of food, but we're seeing more infant mortality, across species, where glyphosate and other chemicals interfere with babies' ability to digest food. Even in my cat family I've watched it happen; normal cats don't allow other adult cats to see their kittens for the first six weeks, but social cats often rear kittens communally, like lions; one cat's milk dries up while she waits for kittens to starve out enteritis, another cat feeds the kittens when they seem to be recovering, and then glyphosate vapors blow past them and the kittens die. The only difference for humans is that, because we're bigger, the process is likely to take longer.
If I were the mother of a baby who was not doing well on artificial food, I'd do whatever I could to induce lactation. (It has to be induced, as if it never started, if the woman didn't feed the baby naturally from the beginning.) It would be an inconvenience but
(1) human milk might save the baby, and
(2) if lactation didn't save the baby it would at least give me some precious moments of hope and bonding, and
(3) if it didn't work at all, if I didn't produce anything the baby recognized as milk, at least I would know (and the rest of the family would know) I'd tried.
But I'd be patient with myself, and move away from any family members who weren't patient with me, about the fact that that willingness to let the baby be artificially fed, on the day it was born, may have been an indication that the baby had no chance. I might need to find ways to become healthier, making better food choices, getting glyphosate and glufosinate banned, etc., before trying to have another baby; otherwise the second baby would probably be sicker and sadder than the first one.
Young women may want to keep this kind of discussion between themselves and their husbands, but they don't have to if they don't want to. Bleep is a young man in any position to know about the practicalities of mothering? An organized group of women who've nursed babies, and are willing to help younger women, currently has chapters in 89 countries. If your country is not listed at
...they can probably make a referral, even for you.
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