Breastonomics 101 - Breastfeeding is Not “Free”
Executive summary: Breastfeeding comes at a cost, whether that is physical, mental, emotional, or financial. We should stop calling it “free.”
When I was pregnant with my first, I went to a breastfeeding class held at our local hospital. The instructor asked everyone in the room what we’d heard about breastfeeding. A husband who was there with his wife repeated the oft heard phrase: “breastfeeding is free.” I muttered just loudly enough for my husband to hear: “Only if you don’t value the woman’s time.” As an economist by training (that sounds a lot fancier than I feel – maybe all I can say is “as someone who has an Econ degree”), I always think about opportunity cost, i.e., what are you giving up when you choose one option over another? For instance, when I got my MBA, tuition cost $65k/year. But not only that, I was also giving up a salary by quitting my job to go back to school. So the total cost of the MBA was $65k + my lost salary, for two years. (But of course the benefits were priceless, as a Mastercard commercial would say. Funny aside: when I was a kid, I thought priceless meant worthless, so those commercials always confused me). Where was I? Opportunity cost. You can’t ignore it if you want to know what a decision is really costing you.
So back to breastfeeding. I think the point of saying it’s free is to compare it to the fact that you have to buy formula. Now that we don’t have wet nurses anymore, we generally don’t buy breastmilk – it flows out of the mother “for free.” But that’s the problem: the mother providing this breastmilk has to take time to pump or feed it to the baby, and time is money! I knew someone at work who shifted to a part-time schedule after mat leave in order to keep breastfeeding (at the suggestion of her lactation consultant). I don’t know what her salary was, but I’d bet she was giving up probably at least $30k to do this. That’s $2,500/month or ~$80/day. For comparison, even pre-mixed ready-to-drink formula costs ~$10/day (assuming the baby drinks 32oz every 24 hours, which is the max my babies ever had). Powder formula is even less. So in this case, formula feeding is waaay less pricey than breastfeeding. And neither is free.
32oz ready-to-feed bottle on the left, and powder formula on the right. Both may be cheaper than the mother’s time.
Now not everyone has a salary so high that they’d be giving up tens of thousands per year to breastfeed. Or maybe some breastfeeding women don’t work for pay. There is still something they’re giving up to make time for breastfeeding, even if it’s not strictly measured in dollars. When I was breastfeeding my babies, I felt chained to the house. For the first month after they were born, I literally did not step foot outside except for pediatrician appointments. I was on mat leave, so I wasn’t giving up pay to do this, but it was a grueling, around-the-clock stressor. I paid a physical and emotional price. And what about people who go back to work but need pumping breaks? Sure, they’re working full-time and receiving their full salaries, but how do you think they make time to pump? By multitasking, working late to catch up, etc. That is a price too.
I’m not speaking against breastfeeding (I wouldn’t have done it twice if I were), but we need to stop circulating the phrase “breastfeeding is free.” That is only true if women are machines who don’t feel and don’t work. On that note though – if you’re interested in the topic and want to hear what the studies really say, I suggest a book called Lactivism by Courtney Jung. My very brief summary is that many studies are poorly set up/ conducted, and the benefits of breastfeeding have been greatly overstated or simplified in the quest to promote the practice. I won’t get into it here, but in our personal experience, my husband and I both felt like there is certain “zealotry” present in the modern campaign to breastfeed. People often think it’s like walking – can’t everyone do it if they just learn how to? But no, we forget that some people literally can’t, for physical/health/medical reasons. (Or their workplace makes it functionally impossible, despite whatever our laws may say on paper). We forget that it’s not just a choice, and there is too much shame and guilt around it (especially during a period when the birthing mother is susceptible to postpartum depression, which has led to tragedy in some cases). That’s another topic for another day. In the meantime, think about the opportunity cost every time you hear that something is “free.” Economics 101 FTW!