The ideology of natural mothering—natural childbirth, lactivism (aggressive breastfeeding promotion) and attachment parenting—proudly presented as both recapitulating mothering in nature and bolstered by scientific research is neither. It is pseudoscience. And like many other forms of pseudoscience, its promoters have an ulterior motive, in this case pressuring women back into the home.

Simply put, natural mothering tells women that their own intellect, talents, needs and desires don’t matter. Mothers don’t matter. The only thing that matters is children’s needs and that children’s wellbeing can only be ensured by maternal suffering.

That’s the conclusion that I have come to after writing about pseudoscience and mothering for over two decades. It has always been a professional and personal interest; I was practicing obstetrician and am the mother of four children, now adults. Over time my thinking has evolved in a direction I never anticipated; I started off believing that fighting pseudoscience was just a matter of better science education. I’ve come to realize that mothering pseudoscience is relatively impervious to scientific evidence. That’s because it reflects our deepest, unexamined — and often sexist — beliefs about women and the role of mothers.

Natural mothering, although often presented as a recapitulation of mothering in nature, bears little resemblance to the way our foremothers cared for their children. Women have always been integral to the survival of small hunter-gatherer bands. They spent hours each day as the gatherers. They spent additional hours laboriously preparing food and performing other domestic tasks. In a very real sense, mothering was an interstitial task, taking place in the gaps while performing other tasks that required attention and energy.

Contemporary “natural mothering” imagines mothering performed instead of other tasks. It is not something that you do while doing everything else; it’s something you do to the exclusion of everything else. Nothing illustrates this better than our cultural preoccupation over working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers. Working is often presented as slighting the traditional role of mother when the reality is that, up until the last 200 years or so, all mothers were working mothers.

The ideology of natural mothering subverts scientific evidence

Natural childbirth is based on the belief that childbirth in nature was painless and safe; in the 20th Century childbirth became painful because women were socialized to believe it was painful. The medical model of childbirth made it unsafe by piling on unnecessary complications that caused more complications than they prevented.

That’s nonsense, of course. Childbirth is inherently dangerous, a leading cause of death of young women in every time, place and culture (including our own) and the leading cause of death in the entire eighteen years of childhood. In the century since its inception, modern obstetrics has lowered the neonatal mortality rate 90% and the maternal mortality rate more than 90%.

Moreover, childbirth is inherently painful. Women’s agony so impressed the writers of the Bible that they explained it as punishment from God. The pain has nothing to do with socialization and everything to do with anatomy. Contrary to the tenets of the natural childbirth movement, there is nothing superior about vaginal birth and there is no benefit to forgoing pain relief1.

In contrast, there are benefits to breastfeeding, but the contemporary lactivist movement has grossly exaggerated those benefits and completely ignored the risks of breastfeeding. Most claims about the benefits of breastfeeding are based on studies that are weak, conflicting and riddled with confounding variables like maternal education and socio-economic status. Careful research shows that the benefits of breastfeeding in industrialized countries are limited to approximately 8% fewer colds and 8% fewer episodes of diarrheal illness in the entire population of infants in the first year. In other words, most infants will experience no obvious benefit to breastfeeding.

Despite the lack of scientifically demonstrated benefits, breastfeeding promotion has become extremely aggressive. The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative, the only private organization that operates within American hospitals, is committed to pressuring all new mothers into breastfeeding. They have increased breastfeeding rates, but there’s been no return on investment. The breastfeeding initiation rate in the US has increased from a nadir of 24% in 1973 to over 76% today. The promised reductions in infant morbidity and mortality have failed to materialize.

Attachment parenting is also pseudoscience. It claims to be based on Attachment Theory, but it is actually the exact opposite. The intellectual founders of Attachment Theory, Bowlby, Winnicott and Harlow, among others, showed that children don’t need perfect mothers, only “good enough” mothers. They showed that specific mothering behaviors were irrelevant; the most important requirement for infant-mother attachment is the infant’s belief that the mother will meet his needs, regardless of how she does it. Contrary to the claims of attachment parenting advocates, unmedicated vaginal birth, breastfeeding and baby “wearing” have no impact on bonding.

Natural mothering is a business

Since natural mothering is so clearly based on the subversion of science as well as outright lying about the scientific evidence, I naively thought that correcting misapprehensions was simply a matter of explaining the actual scientific evidence. I’ve made a lot of headway with that over the years, but not nearly as much as I would have imagined. Gradually I came to understand that natural mothering was a business (or, more accurately, several different interrelated businesses) and that there is a cadre of parenting experts who make money by promoting pseudoscientific claims.

Doulas, and to a lesser extent midwives, rely on the fiction that unmedicated vaginal birth is somehow better even though there is no evidence that it is safer or healthier in any way. Indeed when all childbirth was natural, babies and mothers died in droves.

The moralization of breastfeeding has paralleled the monetization of breastfeeding. Most of the purported benefits of breastfeeding have been “discovered” since the advent of lactation consultants. No one seems to remember that when all babies were breastfed, infant mortality was hideous. Breastfeeding doesn’t cause infant deaths, but it doesn’t prevent them either.

Attachment parenting is a business, too. Millions are spent on books, course and products like infant slings. Once again, those who profit from attachment parenting have been most vociferous in promoting it.

Natural mothering was created and promoted by religious fundamentalists

The profit motive explains why industries are promoting the pseudoscience of natural mothering, but it doesn’t explain why women are buying it. I’ve concluded that natural mothering has become the dominant mothering ideology because it speaks to sexist beliefs about the role of women.

It’s not surprising when you consider the history of the philosophies that make up natural mothering. Natural childbirth, lactivism and attachment parenting were all created by religious fundamentalists who believed that women belong in the home and must be pressured to return to it.

Grantly Dick-Read, the father of natural childbirth, famously said: “Woman fails when she ceases to desire the children for which she was primarily made. Her true emancipation lies in freedom to fulfil her biological purposes …”2.

Dick-Read’s theory of natural childbirth grew out of his belief in eugenics. He was concerned that “inferior” people were having more children than their “betters” portending “race suicide” of the white middle and upper classes. Read believed that women’s emancipation led them away from the natural profession of motherhood toward totally unsuitable activities. Since their fear of pain in childbirth might also be discouraging them, so they must be taught that the pain was due to their false cultural beliefs. In this way, women could be educated to have more children.

The founders of La Leche League were Catholic traditionalists who wished to convince mothers of small children that they should not work. Promoting breastfeeding seemed the ideal way to pressure them to stay home.

In the book _La Leche League: At the Crossroads of Medicine, Feminism, and Religion3, Jule DeJager Ward explains that the La Leche League was:

…founded in 1956 by a group of Catholic mothers who sought to mediate in a comprehensive way between the family and the world of modern technological medicine…

[A] central characteristic of La Leche League’s ideology is that it was born of Catholic moral discourse on family life … The League has very strong convictions about the needs of families. These convictions are the normative heart of its narrative… The League’s presentations and literature carry a strong suggestion that breast feeding is obligatory. Their message is simple: Nature intended mothers to nurse their babies; therefore, mothers ought to nurse…

The idealization of motherhood reflects the place of Mary in Catholic popular devotion…

And Bill and Martha Sears, credited with the origin of attachment parenting, wrote: “We have a deep personal conviction that this is the way God wants His children parented.”4

And just in case you didn’t get the point: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything …”

Sexism

Sadly, the only thing natural about natural mothering is the sexism: the deep, abiding belief that women exist only for the benefit of children and men. They shouldn’t merely ignore their own needs — for intellectual engagement, political and economic power and personal fulfillment — they should be shamed for even considering those needs.

As sociologist Pam Lowe explains in her fascinating book Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice:

…At its heart, maternal sacrifice is the notion that ‘proper’ women put the welfare of children, whether born, in utero, or not yet conceived, over and above any choices and/or desires of their own. The idea of maternal sacrifice acts as a powerful signifier in judging women’s behaviour. It is valorized in cases such as when women with cancer forgo treatment to save a risk to their developing foetus, and it is believed absent in female substance users whose ‘selfish’ desire for children means they are born in problematic circumstances…5

But not just any sacrifice will do.

  1. Natural parenting rejects pain relief in labor, insisting that good mothers sacrifice their physical comfort, willingly enduring hours of agony to protect their babies from the “dangers” of epidurals.
  2. Natural parenting rejects formula, insisting that good mothers sacrifice their physical comfort, sleep, body boundaries, and even mental health to breastfeeding because “breast is best.”
  3. Natural parenting rejects jarred baby food, insist in that good mothers sacrifice time and effort in sourcing organic, GMO-free foods, and hand preparing them to protect children from “toxins.”
  4. Natural parenting rejects routine pediatric preventive care like vaccines, insist if that the mother who sacrifices her time and “does her research” is the best guardian of infant health, and, in any case breastfeeding is protective against all microbial threats.
  5. Natural parenting rejects putting babies down, insisting that good mothers sacrifice their physical comfort, and need for separation and recuperation, because only close physical contact with the mother’s body protects the bond between parent and child.
  6. Natural parenting rejects placing babies to sleep in their own rooms, insist if that good mothers sacrifice sleep, privacy and the opportunity for sexual intimacy because only unremitting physical contact through every hour of the day can ensure infant and child wellbeing.

Sunna Simonardottir expands upon these observations in “Constructing the attached mother in the “world’s most feminist country”:

…Within the discourse of attachment and bonding, the ideal Icelandic mother is constructed as being constantly present, happy, and content with her role, happily breastfeeding and fully understanding of her child’s needs. Her body is not her own but shared with her infant, even after birth, for heat, nourishment, and comfort… [M]others are instructed to direct all their physical and emotional capacities at their children and … the maternal body and mind is subject to disciplinary practises… In this way, both attachment and bonding (or lack thereof) are constructed simultaneously as the problem, as well as the solution for mothers…6

The maternal body is imagined as always functioning perfectly; all problems are therefore ascribed to the mother’s mind.

Susan Franzblau traces the history of restrictive ideals of mothering:

The idea that women are evolutionarily prepared to mother … is consistent with a long historical tradition of using essentialist discourse to predetermine and control women’s reproductive tasks and children’s rearing needs. Evolutionary and biological theories have been embedded in a history of misogynist discourse… Women’s “natural” function … is to reproduce and provide continual care for infants and young children. If the treatment of women differs from the treatment of men, such treatment could be justified in terms of its biological and evolutionary purposes. Essentialism, therefore, is problematic for women who have challenged the idea that motherhood defines them…7

The ideology of natural mothering conveniently intersects with societal and political efforts to marginalize women. This is not the first time that mothering has been romanticized. It also occurred in the Victorian era and the immediate aftermath of World War II. In both cases, structural issues (the Industrial Revolution, the return of men from the military) made it attractive to pressure women back into the home, reserving employment for men. This was justified by ignoring women’s needs in favor of restricting them to their biological functions.

However, the choice was never women’s. The needs of children as defined by various experts, and the fact that women were positioned as exclusively responsible for those needs were translated into the fixed properties of mothers and valorized, unproblematized, and essentialized.

In the 21st Century, these so called experts are midwives, doulas, lactation consultants and attachment parenting advocates. Women’s needs are ignored and women who don’t want to give birth without pain medication, don’t want to breastfeed, and dare to have careers outside the home are pathologized as weak, lazy and selfish. As a result, good mothers are made to feel bad.

But mothers do matter

Mothers aren’t merely incubators to be breached in order to get to the child inside. How women give birth matters. Their pain matters and it should be abolished if they wish. Their sexual function and continence matter. They should not be subjected to traumatic forceps deliveries in order to reach some arbitrary C-section rate target. Their safety is paramount and they should not be pressured to risk their lives attempting vaginal birth after C-section or homebirth in order to avoid spurious risks to their babies’ microbiome and enact a romantic (and ahistoric) ideal of birth.

Mothers aren’t milk dispensers. The benefits of breastfeeding in industrialized countries are trivial and it is up to women to weigh them against the right to control their own bodies, not up to activists’ intent on creating the breastfeeding version of The Handmaiden’s Tale.

Mothers aren’t blankies or binkies or lovies to be glued to a child’s body 24/7/365. They are separate people with independent lives and while they sacrifice much for their children, exactly what they sacrifice and how they do it is up to them, not parenting “experts.”

Mothers matter. Their pain matters; their suffering matters; their needs and desires matter.

There’s no evidence that natural mothering produces children who are smarter, healthier or better adjusted than those who are not. Natural childbirth, breastfeeding and attachment parenting are reasonable choices for those who choose them, but they aren’t prescriptions that must be adopted by every mother for the benefit of every child. Women should understand that natural mothering is not based on science, but rather the beliefs of its promoters. The primary purpose of the ideology of natural mothering is to manipulate women back into the home — where many people still think they belong.

  1. The exception is in extremely premature infants where breast milk lowers the incidence of necrotizing enterocolitis, a deadly complication. ↩︎

  2. Moscucci, Ornella. "Holistic obstetrics: the origins of “natural childbirth” in Britain." Postgraduate medical journal 79, no. 929 (2003): 168-173. ↩︎

  3. Ward, Jule DeJager. La Leche League: At the crossroads of medicine, feminism, and religion. UNC Press Books, 2000. ↩︎

  4. Sears, Martha, and William Sears. The Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Child Care. B&H Publishing Group, 1997. ↩︎

  5. Lowe, Pam. Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice. Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 2016. ↩︎

  6. Símonardóttir, Sunna. "Constructing the attached mother in the “world's most feminist country”." In Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 56, pp. 103-112. Pergamon, 2016. ↩︎

  7. Franzblau, Susan H. "Deconstructing attachment theory: Naturalizing the politics of motherhood."Charting a new course for feminist psychology (2002): 93-110. ↩︎