Alex wrote:
>Even if formula was identical to breast milk, why would that mean women
>shouldn't breastfeed their infants?
>
Because that was the interpretation and the recommendation.
>
>The world is far too complicated to understand all at once. Trying to take
>things apart to understand the pieces seems like a sensible route to knowledge,
>and I don't see how that fact that things are often missed invalidates the
>method.
>
Sometimes it works; sometimes not. The problem with taking things apart
that are not, in reality, apart, is that when you look at them in
isolation, you can neither understand the whole, nor really understand
the part. It's like saying that if somebody can do a plie, a jetee, and
an arabesque, they can dance. Not true.
>An understanding of the parts is a starting point for understanding
>the connections. How does that bad advice about breastfeeding illustrate a
>problem with this approach?
>
It illustrates the problem insofar as the benefit of breastfeeding is
not reducible to the components of breast milk. There may be components
that science is not able to identify, but which nevertheless
exist...like sounds that dogs can hear and others not. There is also the
experience of breastfeeding: the mother's experience of sharing her body
with her child, and the child's experience of having his mother share
her body with him/her that adds a dimension to the nourishment given and
taken.
I am not saying that all mothers should breastfeed no matter what. I am saying that for the space of a generation, mothers were explicitly discouraged and ridiculed for breastfeeding, referred to as "cows," when in fact it was the better way of feeding children.No doubt, a lot of folks talked about the backward, traditional practice of breastfeeding, compared to the new, improved scientific formulas that imparted hygene and optimal nutrition to the infant.
Joanna