Pumping Milk and Nursing Are Not the Same
Some 85 percent of breastfeeding mothers use a pump at least some of the time, but research on the subject is lacking.
The number seems small, but gets larger and larger as you contemplate it: 6 percent. That is the estimated share of breastfeeding mothers who exclusively pump and bottle their milk for their infants, never directly nursing. It is a number that was functionally zero less than a generation ago. And it is a subset of a much larger figure, the 85 percent of breastfeeding mothers who use a pump at least some of the time. This is no less than a “quiet revolution” in human nutrition, as researchers put it.
Women have become, in Jill Lepore’s evocative phrasing, their own . When pumping, their breast milk becomes a commodity; they become producers and their infants consumers, the dyadic experience of breastfeeding
