We have been celebrating World Breastfeeding Week from August 1 to August 7 every year since 1992. It is a sad fact that only 44% of infants in the first six months of life were exclusively breastfed over the period of 2015–2020. One cannot overstate the importance of breastfeeding for both mother and child. The reasons for denying breastfeeding are many: family, social, cultural, medical, and economic, to name a few. At a meta-level, it is disturbing that something so basic as breastfeeding, a necessary part of any species evolution, needs aggressive promotion and advertisement uniformly across all countries in the world.
As basic biology texts make it clear, the three basic qualities of living organisms are protection, growth, and propagation of species. The last is to prevent the extinction of species. Evolution works as a dynamic interplay between nature and the species to nurture these three basic qualities. Breastfeeding is extremely basic for our survival (and arguably our success) as a mammalian species. Among the other factors contributing to removing the infant from breastfeeding are the present narratives of individualism and the utilitarian approach to gender equality. Society is dangerously losing its understanding of the exclusive value that birthing, motherhood, and lactation bring to women. One author significantly says that attacks on the most obvious institutions maintaining female accessibility to males—heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood—form the core triad of feminist ideology. There is something problematic when a biological function becomes a matter of rights or an impossibility to execute because of the many factors around us. If we need to promote breastfeeding, the fundamental brick of species survival, are we really progressing and evolving as human beings?
RANDOM MUSINGS 