Dear friends,

Over the weekend our office received many emails from angry women saying I had attacked breast-feeding. One woman even said I had equated breast-feeding with adultery, which has to be one of the most flagrant acts of misrepresentation I have ever encountered.

 

In truth, the article they were quoting, which they said was new, was written four years ago in June, 2006. Even then it was severely misrepresented, so a few months later, in August 2006, I wrote this response below, portraying my real views on the importance of both breastfeeding and marriage.

 

Should the need arise, I will write an even newer response so that my views are in no way misrepresented.

Thank you.

 

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

 

 

 

 

By Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach

 

?This past June (2006) I wrote a
column and became the anti-Christ, which, in itself, is quite a feat for a
Jewish rabbi. To be sure, in my life I have not hesitated to be controversial
when the situation warranted. But to become, in the eyes of my devoted readers,
the twin brother of Saddam Hussein over a straightforward article on
breastfeeding was, to say the least, unexpected.

 

But OK, if I was wrong, I’ll admit
it. True, as many of you will point out, I’ve never been wrong before. But I
am, after all, human, that is, unless you’re one of my breastfeeding critics,
in which case I am a bushy-bearded, one-eyed Cyclops.

 

But first the facts.

 

The column I wrote was in response to
a New York Times report on the benefits of breastfeeding for babies. I noted
that while no one disagrees that breastfeeding is much better for a baby than
formula, as a marital counselor I had seen that in some marriages, admittedly a
minority, breastfeeding could come between a husband and wife, its incessant
demands serving as an impediment to romance. For many couples it meant not
being able to go out on a date without the baby for months, and having the baby
sleep in the matrimonial bed, with the inevitable deleterious effect on the
couples’ love life. My solution: if breastfeeding created distance between you
and your husband, don’t feel guilty about supplementing the breast with the
bottle.

 

Sounds innocuous, right? But the
suggestion opened the floodgates of hell. Women who admired me as a lifelong
champion of women’s rights, in books like ‘Hating Women’ and ‘Kosher Sex,’ felt
betrayed. They were now calling me a misogynist because, in their mind, I took
the side of male chauvinists whose selfish claim on their wives’ time imperiled
their children, and whose need to eroticize their wives’ breasts took
precedence over the role of the breast in feeding a child.

 

Commentary on the article exploded
all over the internet with the inevitable misquotation and misrepresentation.
Suddenly, I was reading how I had dismissed breastfeeding as unsexy and
destructive to marriages. Women’s breasts’ don’t belong to their husbands, was
how critics castigated the article. One woman wrote a Blog saying,
“Breastfeeding does not hurt marriages. Selfish fathers hurt marriages.”
Less charitably, one blogger claimed that I had equated breastfeeding with
adultery, which is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.

 

My article, of course, said none of
these things. So here is my real position.

?Firstly, I absolutely believe that
women should breastfeed. My wife has breastfed every single one of our nine
children. It was good for her, it was good for the children, and it good for
our marriage because it endeared my wife to me to see the extent of her
devotion to our children. When we took a cross-country RV trip this summer, I
told my wife repeatedly that she should avail herself, on the long daily
drives, of breastfeeding our baby completely rather than giving him the
occasional bottle which she had begun. I ?believe that a woman’s first choice
should always be to breastfeed?

So why did I write my article?
Because when we make breastfeeding an outright obsession, we cause harm
to those families for whom the practice is a hardship. For instance, many
families are absolutely dependent on a wife’s income for their basic
sustenance. So a few weeks after having a baby, a mom will often be forced to
return to work. She will feel extremely guilty at not being able to breastfeed
during the day. Should we dig in the knife by telling her that she is harming
her children? Since formula, albeit as a lesser alternative, exists, should we
make her feel that quitting a necessary job must be prioritized over her rent
and food money for her children? To be sure, it would be much better, of
course, if she were to stay home with her baby. But for many women, that is
simply not an option. And yes, I realize that she can express milk. But for
many women, who are already overrun with too many job and household responsibilities,
the added chore of having to express milk prior to rushing to work, after
getting their other kids ready for school and making lunch, becomes the straw
that breaks the camel’s back.

 

Then there are all the women who
simply cannot breastfeed do to medical considerations. Many moms simply don’t
have enough milk. And every time they read one of these article about how cruel
it is not to breastfeed, they feel like inadequate mothers.

 

Furthermore, however much people will
disagree with and condemn me, I have counseled many marriages where
breastfeeding became an impediment to romance. We can criticize those husbands
all we want for not being understanding about their children’s need to be
suckled. And in those counseling sessions, I did. I made it clear to the men
that love and romance is holistic, encompassing a spouse as woman, wife, and
mother. But in the final analysis if a husband and wife both
agree that the little time they have together is being compromised by the
constantly demands of breastfeeding, then it is for them to make the choice of
an alternative, without those wives being made to feel like  they are
horrendous moms.

 

In my article, I gave the example of
a couple who appeared on Shalom in the Home, even though the
breastfeeding aspect was not included in their on-air story. Their marriage was
passionate and their attraction strong until the birth of their baby boy. This
should not surprise us since a Harvard study indicates that sexual activity
between a husband and wife decreases by about 74 percent in the first year
after the birth of a child. What increased the loss of eroticism for this
particular couple was that the mother nursed her baby constantly, so much so
that the husband no longer felt he even had a place in their marital bed and
moved into a spare bedroom.

?When I met them the baby was already
a year old. The mom told me that her sex and romantic life with her husband had
atrophied because of her being constantly on-call to breastfeed. I told her
that in her case, having nursed the baby for an entire year, there was nothing
wrong with putting him on the bottle some of the time and that the family would
be better served if the marriage was brought back from the brink. Many readers
assailed me for that advice, arguing that I should have told the husband to
stop being so selfish and put the interests of his children first. I would
respond that the husband felt that he had done so for an entire year, but now
wanted to share intimacy with his wife and felt unable to do so because the
baby was always in their bed. I believe strongly that children should have
their own beds and should not be sleeping with their parents. I am adamant
about this advice, what hatred is shown to me for it.

 

In this couple’s case, the wife would
nurse the baby in bed and both would fall asleep. I am, in general, a great
opponent of children sleeping in the matrimonial bed because, first, it is
inappropriate, and second, it prevents parents from being lovers, and a bad and
loveless marriage is ultimately detrimental to the children who are a product
of that marriage. Giving up breastfeeding was the right choice for this
couple because the wife herself complained that she was too tired for sex
since she was up most of the night feeding. She also said that she and her
husband had stopped going out together on dates because she had to be back to
feed the baby. In the first year after the baby’s birth, they did not go out
alone together even once. When she put the baby on the bottle, her love life
was restored and she and her husband were happier.

 

Who has the right to judge this
couple, and condemn the parents for being selfish, when their only desire was
to recapture the affection that had produced the baby in the first place?

 

While I am a staunch advocate of breastfeeding,
and would not recommend the above advice for most couples, including myself, if
forced to choose between a couple’s romantic life and supplementing
breastfeeding with the bottle, I would advocate the bottle. Period. And I will
endure the withering criticism that I have of late to stand by this advice. I
am in the business of saving families and reversing the out of control American
divorce rate. The best thing for children is to see their parents in love
rather than the children becoming yo-yos of a divorced household, pulled
between Mom and Dad every other weekend.

 

Even so, breastfeeding remains the
correct decision for the vast majority of couples and husbands should go out of
their way to support and encourage their wives in making that choice. However
in a case where both spouses agree that breastfeeding has come between them,
then the baby will survive perfectly well on a bottle.

?I have written many times that the
greatest gift a man can give his children is to love their mother, and the
greatest gift a woman can give her children is to love their father. In a
healthy marriage, horrible as it may sound, the relationship comes before the
children. In an unhealthy marriage, the parents put the children before each
other. This, as an marital counselor can tell you, simply doesn’t work.
Husbands and wives with small children should feel no sense of guilt getting a
babysitter once a week so that they can be a man and a woman on a date again.
And they should try and go away at least one, and perhaps, twice a year
together, even though it means leaving the children with family or friends.
Marriages have needs to, and if you starve your marriage it will not survive.
Period.

?As for the many women who were
puzzled by my advice that when they breastfeed they should do so modestly and
try, even a little, to cover up, this is consistent with my advice, given in my
book ‘Kosher Adultery’ and elsewhere, that even after marriage husbands and
wives should not parade around the bedroom naked for fear that overexposure to
each other’s bodies could invite erotic boredom. Yes, the breast is an organ
beautifully designed by G-d for the nurturance of a baby. But even as it
becomes an infant’s milksource, it should always retain its erotic allure.
Surely every woman is, and wishes to remain, attractive in every phase of life,
and surely a husband who truly loves his wife will always show her how
indescribably beautiful she is to him – as mother, wife, and woman.

 

 

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the
international best-selling author of 23 books, is the host of TLC’s Shalom in
the Home and ‘The Shmuley Show’ on WABC in NYC. His new book ‘The Kosher
Sutra,’ is published by HarperOne. His website is www.shmuley.com. Follow him on
Twitter @RabbiShmuley.