TECH REVOLUTION AND THE BREASTFEEDING MOVEMENT

The Breastfeeding Movement Is Experiencing a Tech Revolution—Here's How It's Helping New Moms
On a humid weekend in June, a teal RV decorated with the Pump spotting logo—a heart with the circle-dot doodle of a breast—rumbled into Detroit. The two-year-old start-up, whose app offers a crowd-sourced guide to lactation-friendly spaces, was in the midst of a Kick starter-fueled tour across the country. Inside, pregnant women and new moms relaxed into pastel poufs; three-week-old babies suckled not far from a two-year-old; a lactation coach suggested alternate positions for a better latch. With the RV at humming capacity, someone joked that it might tip.

Welcome to the new breastfeeding revolution.

“Nothing drives innovation like raw need,” says Pumpspotting founder Amy VanHaren, reflecting on the network of mothers that pep-talked her through two rounds of breastfeeding—a time when, as a traveling entrepreneur tasked with overnighting breast milk home to her infants, she was Googling dry ice, crying in bathrooms, and pumping between businessmen on flights. Just a few years later, those pain points have already seen attention from a crop of fem-tech companies, with Milk Stork, based in Palo Alto, California, handling door-to-door shipping on behalf of working mothers; Mamava lactation pods stationed in airports and museums; and new breast-pump designs, such as the cordless, bottle-free Willow.

The flourishing of these and similar start-ups is partly due to a recalibrated Silicon Valley, an outgrowth of a broader reckoning with the gender biases amid venture-capital funds and other institutional forces. And it's partly a facet of the rising #normalizebreastfeeding movement, a hashtag that has amassed nearly 700,000 posts on Instagram. What counts as normal these days? A John Legend postshowing his wife, Chrissy Teigen, pumping in the car to the tune of a million-plus likes; Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth taking her newborn to work following a landmark rules change in congressional procedure; Nigerian-American model Adaora Akubilo Cobb breastfeeding her son in a viral Gap ad. “Culturally we're in a time where there are a lot more conversations about the need to support women,” VanHaren says, “and the breastfeeding space is clearly an important part of that.”

For a manner of nourishment that is biologically ordained, breastfeeding has long been subject to 

societal whims. In the early twentieth century, nursing one's own baby was often a barometer of class: The poor did; the wealthy demurred, turning instead to wet nurses and manufactured infant food. In 1956, the year that Vogueran Irving Penn's soft-focus photograph of a breastfeeding woman (a secular Virgo Lactans scene titled “The Miracle”), La Leche League held its first meeting in an ongoing push to put breast milk back on top—a counterweight to the mid-century gleam of packaged meals. Misleading marketing of baby formula stirred worldwide controversy in the seventies and eighties, even as its popularity held ground. But when breast-pump industry leader Medela introduced its first electric home-use device in 1991, working women found themselves more easily able to keep up their milk supply without being tethered to an infant. Still, freedom often meant pumping, grudgingly, in odd places, while women who chose to nurse endured tsk-tsks or leers.

Nevertheless, women persisted—encouraged by emerging science that continues to underscore the benefits of breast milk. “What we know from a research standpoint is that human milk affects every single organ in the baby's body,” says Diane L. Spatz, Ph.D., a professor of perinatal nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the director of the lactation program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Recent studies show that a real-time feedback loop connects breast and baby, with milk ever-adapting to suit individual needs—whether it's extra nutritional heft for a preterm infant or antibodies to fight off infection. Along with lactoferrin (a key protein for gut health), beneficial microbes, and even unique sugars to feed those microbes, breast milk contains rare stem cells that are thought to boost neuro development. “You can be formula-fed and turn out OK,” Spatz says, but she argues that broader support for breastfeeding—particularly in the first few days after childbirth, a critical window for establishing a latch and stimulating milk production—would go a long way. Sure, it can be a grind—or, as comedian Ali Wong calls it, a “savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now!” It can also be physically painful, emotionally draining, and, for some, frustratingly impossible. But mammals, defiant, are we.

Facts and hashtag lactivism only go so far, and only reach so many people. Addressing the existing gaps in the breastfeeding narrative was front of mind at the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon, hosted by the MIT Media Lab in April. The idea for the inaugural event, in 2014, came to the project's executive director, Catherine D'Ignazio, while she was unceremoniously pumping on the Media Lab's bathroom floor. (They soon installed a Mamava prototype.) Since then, there's been a fairly steady—if high-end—stream of innovation. “The world we want to create is not the world of the $1,000 breast pump,” says D'Ignazio, who, along with Jennifer Roberts, an educator and advocate, made sure to include designers and specialists from far-flung, under served communities at this year's conference. Indigenous women from New Mexico sought ways to adapt ceremonial dress for nursing; a group from the New Orleans Breastfeeding Center proposed a waterproof lactation kit (containing tips for hand-expressing milk, a cooler, and LED lights) for disaster relief.

But the topic at the forefront of attendees' minds was not a product but a policy: paid leave. (Ours is the only industrialized nation without it.) In lieu of a federal mandate, some states are picking up the slack; in the sixteen years since California passed a provision guaranteeing six weeks of leave (a number that jumped to twelve weeks as of January), median breastfeeding rates there have doubled. But with an estimated 25 percent of American mothers returning to work within ten days following childbirth—a punishing statistic—it's easy to see why some call breast milk a luxury good. Confronting that reality is a starting point for meaningful change, says Roberts. “When you design for the people who need it most, everybody is taken care of.”

News credit: Vogue