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Dealing With Divorce
How the Legal System Impacts Breastfeeding By Jenn Director Knudsen
Baldwin cites a UNICEF newsletter that reports breastfed babies have much lower rates than their formula-fed counterparts of death, meningitis, childhood leukemia, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, obesity, developmental delays and ear infections, among other ailments. And nursing is good for mommies, too – breastfeeding mothers have lower rates of breast and ovarian cancers.
UNICEF is not the only organization who recognizes the importance of breastfeeding. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends mothers nurse their babies at least through the first year.
Lofton recognizes that despite all of this, some women may choose not to breastfeed. In those cases a woman may decide, upon the advice of her physician, to use an infant formula, she says. But just because some women would choose to use formula doesn't mean that choice should be forced upon all women by the courts.
Of course this doesn't always happen, and often the courts are brought in to mediate. The legal institution emphasizes a child's need to bond with both his parents, so the nursing process can suffer; a mother may feel compelled by the law to wean her child. Yet, Lofton and others maintain that divorce is no reason to wean a baby entirely.
Lask refused to wean her toddler, even when her state's court mandated for six weeks that she leave the family's home and her husband get full custody of their two children. Her husband had been very supportive of extended nursing when Lask was breastfeeding their daughter, Meg, into toddlerhood. But during the divorce proceedings, Lask says he believed nursing Nicholas beyond a year was "superfluous," and he worried Lask would become the "preferred parent."
Lask says she had no intention of using nursing to keep her son from his father, but was resolute in her commitment to breastfeeding. "I wanted [Nicholas] to have something that was still the same," she says of his life thrown into tumult at a very young age. At the time, she was nursing him five times a day.
Lask worked around the brief court order. In the dead of winter, she drove from her apartment to her old home, took Nicholas into her car and nursed him in the confines of the freezing vehicle.
"It was a nightmare," she says. Lask found the court's stance "surprising."
Soon though, when their divorce was finalized, she was granted full custody of her kids, and her ex-husband was granted visitation rights. During his extended time with Meg and Nicholas, Lask continued nursing her son in her car, weaning him entirely at 22 months of age.
