In the middle of the night a few days before Thanksgiving, I woke up with excruciating abdominal cramps. A CT scan revealed that my appendix had perforated and I needed emergency surgery.
There were lots of things to stress about: I had a 3-month-old, Pearl, whom I’d never been away from overnight. I had a 3-year-old, Dorie, who would once again worry about my “sore tummy” just as I’d finished my postpartum healing. But one thing I felt mercifully calm about was Dom, my husband, and his ability to care for Pearl on his own. The previous three months had been a crash course in parental equality, our conscious attempt to reverse the infuriatingly lopsided dynamic we had experienced with our first child. At the heart of it was a simple strategy: Use baby formula early and often.
Every new parent instantly learns that feeding is paramount. It’s entwined with sleep, soothing, the fundamental process of becoming attuned to your baby. Perhaps that’s why breastfeeding, whatever its pluses, can kick off an undesirable, often stubborn imbalance between parents, one that extends beyond the act of feeding. So in an age when the vast majority of parents support the concept of equal parenting (even as dads still don’t share the load equally), why don’t we openly discuss one of the best ways to avoid that imbalance?
There are plenty of good reasons to breastfeed, from passing on protective antibodies to your baby in the first few months of life to a lovely way of bonding. Women will not be surprised to hear this; our society bombards us with the benefits of breastfeeding, many of which, like the claim that it increases a baby’s I.Q., are tenuous at best. By contrast, finding guidance on how to fairly distribute the mind-boggling amount of care required for a newborn feels like going on a treasure hunt through Reddit threads and mom group chats. When I asked a lactation consultant about introducing formula to Dorie, she acted as if I’d asked where to score an illegal drug.
Formula has been hotly debated ever since its invention as a commercial product in the mid-19th century, when the German chemist Justus von Liebig devised a powder that may have caused the deaths of several babies. By the 1960s, the recipe for formula had vastly improved. Ad campaigns promoted its use as medically endorsed and superior to breast milk, which was at a record low of 25 percent among new mothers. Then, amid criticisms of formula companies — including their aggressive marketing to women in developing countries who lacked access to clean water with which to prepare their product — feminists were among the groups who pushed for a return to breastfeeding, arguing that it gave women bodily autonomy in an overmedicalized world. (Other feminists felt, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, that it was “exhausting servitude.”)
The breastfeeding comeback that began in the 1970s was empowering and fulfilling for many women. For others, the slogan “breast is best” became yet another source of pressure; the recommendation from pediatricians that women breastfeed exclusively for six months was hard to square with our country’s lack of guaranteed paid maternity leave. At a recent press event Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, called breast milk “the infant formula that God made.”
The Fed Is Best movement, which validates all kinds of reasons parents choose formula, from low milk production to mental health issues, has pushed back on the idea that the breast is always better. Academics like Elisabeth Badinter have praised formula as a way to liberate women from the confines of the home. And yet equal parenting is still more likely to be framed as a nice byproduct of using formula, not the impetus for it.
It was the impetus for me. Years before I became a mother, Dom and I agreed that of course he would be just as involved in parenting as I would. But then we had Dorie. I breastfed for eight months not because I particularly enjoyed it but because it seemed to be the default. I did all the bedtimes, all the night feeds. The bottles we did use mostly contained breast milk, the result of many hours of being sucked by a breast pump. The bonding effect with Dorie was real, but it also meant my ability to understand the contours of her needs deepened as Dom became more and more sidelined. The resulting resentment nearly broke us as a couple. The unfair burden and sleep deprivation nearly broke me.
When Pearl came along, we vowed to do things differently. We’ve been much more liberal with our use of formula, and the result has been the parenting dynamic I always dreamed of. It’s not only taken the pressure off me, but also given Dom the ability to bond with and learn his baby right away. He did overnight feeds that provided me with long stretches of sleep. We traded tips on soothing methods. Formula gave Dom autonomy to feed as he saw fit, to experiment and fail and try again without worrying about wasting “liquid gold.”
Many parents discover the equalizing magic of formula or combo-feeding on their own. They experiment with using only formula at night, or perhaps see how even one formula bottle a day can provide much-needed relief to a nursing mother. But parents are left to conduct this trial and error alone, without much counsel or transparency.
Even a more open-minded lactation consultant probably would have cautioned against the willy-nilly combo feeding we employed with Pearl. Combo feeding may undermine breastfeeding, experts say, either because it affects the supply of breast milk or because babies might start to prefer the bottle. The few studies on combo feeding that exist show that this is a real risk, but the research is sparse. Perhaps if we actually took women’s lives seriously and acknowledged the boons of combo feeding, there’d be a bevy of informed advice at our fingertips.
For whatever reason, in my case, formula did indeed edge out breast milk. Pearl instantly loved her bottle, and by the third month I was barely nursing. Still, every time I felt ambivalent about that — either because I missed the intimacy of more frequent nursing or because the “breast is best” camp lived rent-free in my head — I would remind myself that raising children with a fully engaged partner was a major priority of mine. I imagine I was about as upset as some happily nursing mothers whose babies struggle with bottle refusal: a little annoyed, but ultimately secure in my choice.
Lots of parenting decisions involve trade-offs. It’s time to explicitly tell parents-to-be, before they’re in the trenches, that the two worthwhile enterprises of exclusive breastfeeding and equal parenting are a zero-sum game — and that it can be utterly life-changing to choose the latter.
Nona Willis Aronowitz is a writer, a critic and the editorial director of The Meteor.
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