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Breast Sharing: Cross-feeding among Australian women
Debbie Long
Centre for Clinical Governance Research, University of New South Wales, NSW
Abstract
This article discusses cross-feeding among Australian women. What I term 'cross-feeding' or 'co-feeding' involves a woman breastfeeding a child who she has not given birth to, or women breastfeeding each other's babies.
For some women, cross-feeding is completely 'natural', for others the concept of their baby breastfeeding from another woman is an abhorrent idea which disrupts the 'natural' mother/child bond. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the maternity unit of an urban Australian public hospital, this article explores a range of situations in which women cross-feed.
I argue that ambiguities expressed about cross-feeding echo ambiguities inherent in conceptualisations of the mother/child relationship.
Keywords
breastfeeding, co-feeding, cross-feeding, ethnography, maternity
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