Infant feeding is a human rights issue — and the misogyny in infant feeding discourse is used to distract attention from any number of human rights issues.

Coercing someone into or out of breastfeeding is a human rights violation.

Coercing someone into or out of formula feeding is also a human rights violation.

Some of the coercion is emotional — and there are also a lot of other forms of coercion involved.

And let’s be clear — there’s more at stake in emotional coercion than just having unpleasant feelings or making people feel guilty. Emotional coercion can have really intense consequences, up to and including driving people to suicide.

Another form of coercion related to infant feed is relationship coercion.

Having a baby often makes women very, very vulnerable to male partners.

Teaching men to disregard bodily autonomy when it comes to infant feeding has really serious consequences.

(This can and does happen with other genders of gestational parents and partners as well.)

Or, to put it another way: If you’re against domestic violence and financial abuse, don’t encourage people to disregard their partners’ bodily autonomy when it comes to infant feeding.

Another form of coercion is medical coercion, especially for mothers and other gestational parents who have long term medical care needs.

That’s an area in which coercion very much happens in both directions.

When you have chronic conditions and doctors want to insist for ideological reasons that people like you must breastfeed or must formula feed, refusing to do what they want comes with real risks.

Being labeled as a noncompliant patient can lead to worse medical care or outright denial of medical care.

Patients only have so much capital for asserting autonomy, and people with chronic conditions tend to need it for other things.

Speaking personally, one reason I didn’t think it was safe to try breastfeeding is that I don’t think I can trust the medical system to be honest with me and prioritize my health fully if they knew that I was breastfeeding.

I probably would have gone with formula anyway for any number of other reasons.

Nevertheless, I wish that medical coercion didn’t have to be a factor in my decision making.

There’s also a lot of economic coercion when it comes to infant feeding.

For example, in the WIC program in the United States, food access is used as a way to coerce poor women into breastfeeding.

Anyone who cares about human rights should be outraged by this:

https://wicbreastfeeding.fns.usda.gov/whats-your-wic-food-package

Mothers and children who don’t use formula are given more food and better food.

Food is intentionally withheld from people who use formula as a means of coercing breastfeeding.

There is absolutely no excuse for treating people this way. None.

Economic coercion also exists in the other direction: Many mothers are forced to work under conditions that make direct breastfeeding and/or pumping impossible. (And many of those same mothers are also punished by WIC for formula feeding.)

More generally, food insecurity and lack of access to clean water both coerce people into breastfeeding.

Malnourished women who can’t count on reliable access to adult food for themselves and formula for their babies can still usually lactate enough to feed their babies.

That creates economic coercion to breastfeed.

Mothers who lack reliable access to clean water can usually still produce milk that is safe for their babies to drink.

That also creates economic coercion to breastfeed.

This is an area in which English-speaking opposition to formula stigma tends to break down.

All too often, people say things like “well, of course in third world countries women need to breastfeed, but in the west, there’s no real safety issue and no reason for that pressure.”

That kind of sentiment overlooks at least two critical things: 1) Water injustice and food insecurity are also common in ‘western’ countries, and 2) women who live in places in which corporations operate with more impunity also have human rights.

When people live in unjust circumstances that make breastfeeding the only safe option, we should remember that the existence of formula is not the problem. The fact that people don’t have safe access to formula is the problem.

Or to put it another way: you can’t fight any form of injustice with misogyny or with patriarchy.