Postnatal bedsharing advice, risk and exploitation: a feminist analysis

Problem

Breastfeeding is beneficial to babies and mothers. Postnatal bedsharing is evidenced to support breastfeeding and maternal wellbeing. Advice against bedsharing creates a barrier to breastfeeding. It also frames women as an inherent risk to their baby, something statistically untrue in the absence of known risk factors. Women are advised to both breastfeed, and to not bedshare, which sets up a contradiction. Telling mothers they are simultaneously a risk to, and a resource for, the baby, can lead to exhaustion, shame, confusion and difficulties breastfeeding.

Discussion

To investigate this seeming contradiction in UK breastfeeding and bedsharing advice I examine the risk discourse and Douglas’ conception of risk and pollution. To explain why women’s bodies are a site of contestation, and why some risks (overlaying) are amplified over others (lower breastfeeding rates or maternal exhaustion) I use radical materialist feminism. I argue that risk discourses and taboos around bedsharing are part of a patriarchal ontology of the sovereign individual which denies the intrinsic interdependence and relationality. Denying the centrality of the mother-baby dyad as a relation is part of the mechanism of exploitation of women. The bedsharing advice reduces the woman’s subjectivity and agency, which is to the detriment of mothers and babies because their wellbeing is interdependent.

Conclusion

The prevalence of bedsharing advice is explained by an ontology in which individuals are imagined as a risk and/or a resource to one another. The driving force is not the wellbeing and support of the dyad, but exploitation of women and re-enforcement of patriarchal logic. Women-centred feminist postnatal advice would better support the dyad.

Tweetable abstract

Advice against postnatal bedsharing positions women as a risk and resource, to the detriment of the mother-baby dyad and breastfeeding, and in service of patriarchal exploitation of women as a resource.