And i am really delighted to welcome back to the university to very dear friends and distinguished colleagues, both former members of the politics department. Lift us about a decade ago. Ontario canada and new mexico respectively. First and foremost i am pleased to introduce Courtney Young his new book, we are here to celebrate. The book was published last month. Everyvi everyview overview of her book and then mala will respond and moderate the discussion. She is a professor for the science at the university of new mexico and the author of two books. Inclusion without representation; gender quarters and ethnic reservations in latin america. In 2015, she was named the Andrew Carnegie fellow. She has a bachelor from harvard and a degree from stanford. I want to quote one endorsement of the book before we begin from their former school. The professor of philosophy and politics quote this riveting books charts the constilations that make it racist victim blaming and policies that deny food to formulafed children, Courtney Jung explains americas love of the breast pump and failure to provide paid mateat n Maternity Leave. My own experience with breastfeeding is limited obviously but as a baby boomer, born to a working mother in communist poland i was breastfed for six months. My on, on the other hand, also born to a working mother but in the liberal United States, was breastfed for an extravagant, you may say excessive but three years, eight months and 14 days. In both cases it was the same. My family in a sense, too, is a victim of this conspiracy so eloque eloquently discussed in courtneys book. Without further ado, professor Courtney Jung. [applause] thank you very much, robert. I cannot tell you how happy i am to be here. To be home at the news school. I am going to fix the problem that robert created here. Yeah. Thank you very much. I am so happy to be here. With a topic like this there are many a topic like this is ripe for many interesting and amusing introductory antidotes and i decided to expense the introducto introductory antidotes which would have been at me and cut to the chase. People have expressed surprise that i am writing about breastfeeding as if this would be a health issue or a gender study issue and not a Political Science issue. But what was interesting to me about breastfeeding and the surprising consensus among breastfeeding. Consensus is not easy to find anywhere. Consensus is a rare thing. When you have consensus it seems like a reasonable think to study. How do you get consensus . Where does it come from . What work does it do in our lives . Critical social theory going on here. Investigating how we come to hold the beliefs that we have and what works those beliefs are doing in our lives, how they shape our attitudes, and how they affect our public policies. One place to start with a project like this is to look at the Science Behind breastfeeding. One way of thinking about this is is it driven by science and Scientific Evidence . The answer to that question is basically no or not really. So all of the research onis obs. There are no randomized controlled trials into breastfeeding and nonbreastfeeding Health Outcomes of babies. The problem with Observational Research is it has to control for confounding variables. Other things that might account for differences between breastfed and nonbreastfed babies. The older research on breastfeeding failed to control for confounding factors. Most of it failed to control for confounding factors. There is Newer Research now which is better in many ways in that it better defines breastfeeding, it better controls for confounding factors. And that evidence shows that breastfeeding has a modest impact on the risk of infection during the time the baby is actually breastfeeding. It has a small impact on the risk of infection. There is good evidence that breastfeeding has no impact on obesity, type one diabetes, asthma, allergies and cancer. And the rest of the list that have been attributed to breastfeeding the research is basically characterized as weak and inconclusive and this includes type two diabetes, cardiovascular, and other things. The list is extremely long and almost everything on that list. Some of it has been well disproven and the rest of it we dont know. The literature is inconclusive. The answer to the first question is no, it is not being driven by Scientific Evidence. That takes us back to what it is being driven by, right . For a political scientist that comes an interesting thing to sturd study. If it is not driven by science what it is driven by and i will answer that question in three pieces. The first piece of the puzzle what does breastfeeding mean to people in the United States today. And that story starts with a league in 1956 two women, mary white and Mary Ann Thompson were sit together at a Christian Family movement picnic breastfeeding their babies and limenting the fact not many other people were breastfeeding their babies and mothers didnt have enough support if they chose to breastfed breastfeed. The center piece of their project was breastfeeding because already, right at the inception, right at the beginning, breastfeeding was symbolic of a larger set of philosophy which included the mother staying at home and nurturing the children and mothers shouldnt work once they have children and the role of the father as the breadwinner. The conception of family and philosophical picture that went along with the focus on breastfeeding. So already you have the rise or the beginning ways of breastfeeding advocacy using breastfeeding as an analogy. The next big movement is the nestle boycott in the 1970s. Nestle and other Formula Companies looked out on the developing world and saw nothing but a vast untapped network of potential formula feeders. So they initiate aggressive marketing practices in order to get women in poor countries to buy and use formula. The most famous of those marketing practice was the nestle nurses. They dressed their employees up as nurses and sent them into hospitals and clinics and got them to convince mothers to use formula under the guides that formula was what was medically recommended. So that is one picture. These are obviously nestle nurses in south africa. You can tell from the sign behind them. This is a whole team of nestle employees in malasia in 1976. What happened was that nestle is selling formula in poor countries and mothers in those poor countries are they cannot afford formula. So they are over diluting the formula. They are mixing it with too much water because they are trying to make a can of formula last longer. So babies are becoming malnourished because the formula is overdiluted and they are essentially drinking colored water. Water that is milky colored. And the second problem is they are diluting the powdered formula with dirty water, unsterilized water. As a result of both of these things you have a spike in infant mortality and infant malnutrition and diseases. The response is to reestablish breastfeeding as the norm for infant feeding in developing countries. At that point you have the nestle boycott. It happened in the United States, canada and all over europe and it is very widespread and very poplar. Everybody is boycotting nestle products. In fact, this boycott was the longest and most widespread boycotting every. People are boycotting them today even. People boycott nestle more often than they do phillip morris. This establishes breastfeeding as a challenge against big business in solidarity with the global poor and the worlds struggle against hunger and a challenge against corporate greed and corporate interest. Breastfeeding gets appropriated as a symbol of something bigger. Of something i believe in with the type of person i am. I am a person that encourages corporate breed. In the 1980s, feminism picks up breastfeeding and it becomes a symbol of female empowerment and the symbol of the lifesustaining force of the female body. In the 1990s breastfeeding is symbolic and important for families that believe in the philosophy of attachment parenting. Attachment parents are parents there are three pillars. The first is baby wearing which means carrying your baby in a swing rather than using a stroller to get your baby around town. The second is cosleeping which is sleeping in the same bed as your child. And the third is breastfeeding. So attachment parenting is a larger philosophy. Breastfeeding is a hallmark of that philosophy but it is a larger statement about what your family is like, your Family Commitment is like, what you are like as a parent and who you are in general. Maybe more surprising to me breastfeeding has been embraced by the christian right. For many on the christian right breastfeeding is proof of intelligent design and it offers evidence of the rightness of het heterosexual marriage. It has been picked up as an issue for environmentalist as well and people that believe in locally, produced Sustainable Food because after all what could be more locally produced than breast milk. So these groups who are fundamentally opposed to each other and wouldnt see eye to eye on any other issue across the political or social spectrum but they all belief in breastfeeding. The point i am showing is they all believe in breastfeeding for fundamentally different reasons. They have appropriated the symbol of breastfeeding but for many different reasons. This is the slide i was showing with the attachment parenting. Many of you remember ththis this tithis tim this tithis tim this timecover of a magazine showing a three or four year old boy breastfeeding wearing camouflage pants. He looks old and big. That is the first part of the puzzle. That is the first part of the picture which is the ways in which breastfeeding has taken on symbolic meaning and how much value and symbolic value it has for so many people. Breastfeeding isnt all things to all people but a surprising number of things to a surprising number of people. The second part of the puzzle, the second piece of the puzzle actually has to do, not surprisingly, with business. There is a business angle to this which is surprising for those that associate the business of infant feeding with the business of infant Formula Companies. The idea here is breastfeeding is free. That was the challenge against breastfeeding. But yet it is far from free in 21st century america. And the first reason it is far from free is if you ever plan to leave the house you are going to have to buy some clothes, and bras and you might need Nutritional Supplements and pillows and shields and creams. And it is not necessary to buy any of these but most people who brooes breastfeed in the United States today will buy many of these things. The second component is lactation consultant. Most women who breastfeed will see a lactation consultant and that will run from 200 500 an hour. There is an industry of consultants making a living off breastfeeding. And the final component of the business of breastfeeding is the breast pump industry. In 2007, in the United States, people did a study on breastfeeding and found 80 of american women who breastfeed are pumping. That explains why 40 of the worlds market for breast pumps is an american market. There is nowhere else in the world where women are pumping breast milk as much as they are in the United States. And so in the next few years the worlds market, the worlds Breast Pump Market, is expected to reach 2. 6 billion annually. As i said, 40 of that market is in the United States. And all of this pumping creates something that is new in the history of human kind which is a surplus of human milk building up in the freezers and refrigerators of american women. I wont say anymore. Building up in the refrigerators and freezers of american women. So the combination of the internet and the pump has revolutionized wet nursing whereas wet nursing would be a service now it is a product that is sold online routinely. This is a good image. I need to step back here a minute. Let you think that the nestle nurses are a thing of the past. This is a store on the upper side of man hattan called yummy mummy and the owner of the store is the one in the middle. The people surrounding her are not nurses but employees and dressed in White Lab Coats to sell all of things they sell in their breastfeeding store like pillows, supplements, and pumps. So the phenomena of dressing people up as nurses to convince people the way we recommend your baby is medically sanctioned is not dead. It is alive and well right here in manhattan. As a result of all of this pumping, and as a result of the surplus of human milk, what we have in the United States is a thriving human milk market. A Thriving Market in human milk. So the most common website where people buy and sell milk is called only the breast. These are four ads i took from only the breast just yesterday. So all of this breast milk is Still Available probably if you want some of it. So people buy and sell breast milk any day of the week. You can see between 1216,000 post here at only the breast for people buying and selling breast milk. It is not only mothers looking to feed their babies but athletes are buying breast mimic and consuming it because they are looking to boost their performance. And people are interested in drinking breast milk because they are thinking of it as the new super food. It is better than wheat grass, you know . And so they are looking to boost their immunity or whatever they are looking to do. So there is a big market in human milk. So these people, other people who sell their breast milk, are not necessarily selling online to other mothers and other individuals. A lot of people sell their breast milk to companies. There is a company in california called prolactate bio science and buys breast milk for a 1 an ounce. And they use it has a raw material in the production of Nutritional Supplements. They buy the breast milk for a dollar an ounce and they turn it into the base of the Nutritional Supplement and sell the supplements for 180 an ounce. It is a private company. So they dont disclose their profits every year but they have disclosed they have received 46 million in Venture Capital in the last couple years. And this is a growing industry. There are prolacta is the Oldest Company in this market but it is not the only one. There are six or seven other Companies Competing with prolacta to produce things like Nutritional Supplements but the raw material of all of them is the human milk. One of the things that is interesting about this is Companies Like medula, the largest breast pump manufacturing in the world, and prolacta bio science which is caulo also making money off human milk. Both of these Companies Fund research in the Chemical Properties of human milk which is a new line of research. Not long ago people who were interested in breastfeeding and who were breastfeeding experts and studied breastfeeding were breastfeeding researchers and went to conferences and studied breastfeeding. Now they study human lactation and go to conferences called things like innovation in human lactation and there are laboratories there is a laboratory in Western Australia that is funded byed medula at the university of Western Australia and it is a human lactation lab. It is run by a guy who specializes in cow and pig lactation. Now this is just human lactation. He moved his expertise in cow and pig lactation neatly into the human lactation sphere. One of the things i think is compelling here is all of this pumping is producing not only are people making money now in the breastfeeding sector but they have a vested interest in making sure that the breastfeeding sector is not outside of the market. That it is drawn into the market. And the premise of all of this has to be what is valuable about breastfeeding is not the motherchild interaction at the breast but instead the consumption of human milk. It is driving this whole new line of research into the the consumption of human milk transforming how it is we understand what counts as breastfeeding. Transforming breastfeeding into human milk consumption. And this in turn is driving Public Policy and advocacy issues. And president obama has launched a number of initiatives and at a federal level these initiatives are unusual. There havent been president s before who have been launching breastfeeding initiatives. But the interesting thing about these initiatives is that not a single one of them has anything to do with breastfeeding. All of them are in fact about pumping. So in 2011, the fair labor standard act was reformed require to provide space and unpaid work breaks to new mothers so they could pump at work. In 2012, the irs amended the tax code to allow mothers to take Tax Deductions for pumps. And in 2013 that was superseded when the Affordable Care act was required to have Insurance Companies cover the cost of all pumps for new mothers. So suddenly, all new mothers in the United States were entitled to receive a free, new breast pump. And so obviously that 85 figure that was quoted in 2007 is now much closer to 100 because american mothers are getting free breast