In 2007, Petronella Yvonne de Horde was attacked by a silverback gorilla at the Rotterdam zoo. She had been a frequent visitor to Bokito’s enclosure for years. From de Horde’s point of view, they shared a special connection, frequently making eye contact and smiling. But for a gorilla, eye contact and teeth baring are signs of aggression. One day, Bokito snapped; he escaped his enclosure and attacked her. De Horde sustained bite wounds and a broken arm and wrist but said of the gorilla, “He is and remains my darling.”
This anecdote came to mind when I read Jennifer Grayson’s Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy. By Grayson’s account, the volume is motivated by her experience breastfeeding her two-year-old daughter in front of a chimpanzee enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo. One of the chimps was also breastfeeding an infant. Grayson locked eyes with the ape and ruminated:
"For the next ten minutes, we stayed as we were, eyes locked, nursing our babies silently, and I felt myself slip back in time once more: It was just me, my daughter, and our ancestors from 13 million years ago. Then I broke the spell by wondering, When had the wall been so firmly wedged between us, just like that glass barrier?"
In the United States, Grayson feels like an outsider for nursing a toddler. But she learns that worldwide, weaning ages vary from about two to seven years, putting her squarely in the majority of mothers. She sets out to explore contemporary attitudes toward infant feeding in the West with evidence from history, medicine, and international breastfeeding activists.
Unlatched aims to combine research into the history and science of breastfeeding with anecdotes from Grayson’s own experiences as a mother. This is intermittently successful, as when she describes how an ill-informed pediatric nurse advised her to feed her daughter an electrolyte solution rather than breastfeeding her during an illness, as “dairy” would only upset the baby’s stomach. Her accounts of the relationship between infant formula manufacturers and pediatricians at various points in history—not to mention the deeply unscrupulous strategies used to promote formula in the developing world, with devastating health consequences—are compelling and galvanizing. Likewise, her descriptions of breastfeeding practices and public policy in Vietnam are illuminating: after a concerted five-year campaign that increased the duration of paid maternity leave, banned infant-formula advertisements, and publicized information about best breastfeeding practices through TV, social media, and advertisements in public places, breastfeeding rates soared and child health outcomes improved dramatically.
But Grayson founders spectacularly when she attempts to generalize beyond her own experience and the historical record, betraying a rather stunning incapacity for accepting variations in cultural norms or even individual temperament. Most memorably, she speculates that lower breastfeeding rates among African American women are due to the legacy of slavery and forced wet nursing (the hedging phrase “whether it’s conscious or not” is used to disguise the fact that no evidence or even anecdotes are mustered in support of this claim). Moreover, she attributes the higher rates of obesity, asthma, and death among Black babies to bottle-feeding without mentioning poverty, environmental factors, or persistently racist economic policy in this country. These two acts of oversimplification—attributing all differentials in childhood health outcomes to infant feeding practices and presuming that Black women make bad decisions based on the legacy of slavery, rather than having different priorities than her—typify Grayson’s myopia. In contrast, the sociologist Linda M. Blum found, in interviews conducted for her book At the Breast, that many Black American women intentionally choose bottle-feeding so that they can work outside the home and so that other family members can easily care for their children. In other words, they make the informed and reasonable judgment that economic security and strong family relationships are more valuable to their children than breastmilk.
Likewise, in an early chapter that purports to describe ancient breastfeeding practices, Grayson refers to the modern-day !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, who carry their young babies in slings and nurse them several times an hour, day and night. This is, Grayson assures us, the default mode of mothering: the !Kung “are one of those existing hunter-gatherer societies with a direct link to our primordial past.” This insistence that !Kung people are somehow without culture is, to say the least, a troubling instance of primitivism. It is also misguided, given that the !Kung historically practice infanticide (of babies born breech or with birth defects, or with the smaller of a pair of twins, as the anthropologists Robert and Sarah LeVine detail in the excellent Do Parents Matter?) and in many other ways do not uphold the values of Western attachment parenting.
Discussing parenting practices in the United States, Grayson frequently betrays an offputting conviction that her commitment to breastfeeding reveals her superiority as a parent. She refers dismissively on many occasions to parents who are more concerned with looking at their phones than taking care of their children, genuinely feels betrayed by the fact that she was bottle-fed as an infant, and says proudly,
“The advantage was that I always had at least one magic orb at the ready to quell any tantrum, and to lull them quickly to sleep at night so I could go put my feet up and have a glass of wine. That, and that I deeply, deeply loved my girls, in a way I wasn’t sure all parents did.”
Ultimately, Grayson cannot imagine that her life as a parent—in which she is not apart from her children for more than four hours for four straight years, forgoing all solitary travel, nursing her daughters while writing, researching, and conducting interviews, and acting as the primary parent at all times of the day or night—could feel like a prison, not an accomplishment, for mothers with different temperaments and priorities. Her conviction that there is a single, natural way of mothering, which has of late been obstructed by sinister cultural practices, is both alienating and unfounded.
To Grayson’s credit, the conclusion of Unlatched focuses on policy proposals—maternity leave, expanded medical research regarding lactation difficulties, on-site childcare, and laws against ostracizing breastfeeding mothers—that are sensible, uncontroversial, and supportive. And much of the historical and scientific research she undertakes is original and constructive. But ultimately, her inability to recognize or respect mothering practices that differ from her own is a deep-running flaw that undermines the book and reduces its potential reception.