Sources of our Becoming
Letters on breastfeeding

Our thoughts are not born in isolation. They are shaped by the stories we hear, the norms we inherit, and the silences we are taught to accept. In the realm of infant feeding, few topics are as emotionally charged and socially complex as breastfeeding. The way we think about it — as natural, as optional, as burdensome, as empowering — is deeply influenced by cultural narratives, medical discourse, marketing strategies, and generational beliefs. Breastfeeding activism challenges us to examine these sources critically. It asks: Who benefits from the way we think about breastfeeding? Whose voices are amplified, and whose are dismissed? By tracing the origins of our thoughts, we begin to reclaim them — and in doing so, we create space for informed, compassionate, and justice-driven conversations about infant nourishment and maternal autonomy. 


These letters are written by An Eerdekens, neonatologist and IBCLC lactation consultant, Melanie Miller, IBCLC lactation consultant, and Inge van Nistelrooij, care ethicist. They are an invitation to the reader: to walk alongside us, to discuss, to reflect, and to deepen. It is a call to plant seeds — seeds that highlight the significance of this ingenious piece of biology within our society. Breastfeeding is not merely about feeding a child; it is about the emergence of relationality, a defining trait of our humanity. It touches upon ecology, philosophy, women’s rights, and human rights. Through this exploration, we hope to shed light on its broader meaning and impact.

We wish the reader an enriching journey through these reflections, and we look forward to your response.




Email: gloedacademy@gmail.com

[continued]
29th of July, 2025
Letter by Inge

 ... not be able to survive without other humans feeding us, helping us become who we are. Other people and their feeding us are the literal sources of our becoming.

Next to other people and the food from their bodies, breasts and hands that has fed me throughout my life, I find art extremely helpful in becoming who I am. As the Dutch philosopher Jos Kessels writes, I sometimes feel fragmented and distributed. One of Kessels’ books is on Bach’s collection of pieces called the Well-tempered Clavier, which is like a world of all human feelings, offering a mental development true to life itself. Listening to this music moves you through all possible varieties of emotions, but in a way that helps you move from restlessness to a world of peace, he writes. Like music, which in my life has always been present, coming from a musical family, visual art too helps me regain coherence. Art does this in a wordless way, almost like magic. I do not know how it works, nor do I need to know how it works, but it does. Music and visual arts have this effect on me: whenever I feel lost or feelings of despair about the world threaten to overwhelm me, music and art lift me up and give me back to myself. Going outdoors undoubtedly helps too. Long walks particularly.


I did not know the work by Berlinde de Bruyckere, thanks for introducing her fascinating work to me, An! I have been long inspired by my favourite artists on the female body, ideology of motherhood, and being simultaneously a mother and an artist, Kathe Kollwitz and Louise Bourgeois. They continue to enchant and captivate me, enrage me and bring me to tears. Bourgeois is famous for the ambivalence on the mother-child-relation expressed in her work, particularly in her spider-figures which she called Maman. Here is a picture of Maman (1999), standing next to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain:





The work resonates with me and brings me home to my childhood, full of ambivalent feelings, both connected and restrained, supported and entangled, particularly by my mother who was primarily responsible for our upbringing. I am revisiting those memories often, now that my parents have become fragile in their old age, and need our care. But this image also opens up thoughts on my own motherhood: how do I relate to my own children? Do I protect them or overprotect them? Do I support them, or hinder their self-reliance? Like Sara Ruddick wrote: this caring practice for children requires mothers and all parents to think. And this is never without ambivalence, conflict, mistakes and repair.

And thank you, Mel, for engaging in this letter-writing and describing it as an open space for shared curiosity, connection and wonder. We indeed share these. And all three of us do so in a time of our lives when we also seek companions, as we find ourselves entangled in interior dialogues, seeking for ways forward. Each of us have so many thoughts and experiences which have recently brought us to a point where we made important decisions in our lives. I recently left the academic world, for instance. You moved from the US to Scotland. And An finds herself at a crossroad in her life too. We all found each other in a time when we faced essential questions about our lives, what was worthwhile, and whether we were still serving our bodies, our minds, our loved ones, or had ended up somewhere we no longer wanted to be.

Speaking for myself, I also sought a renewed sense of purpose, to borrow your words, Mel. I am in my late fifties, have done exciting things in my life and met with wonderful people, but I felt that I needed a new turn that liberated me from institutional boundaries that had started to limit me. For every institution that I have worked in, has come with both opportunities and inevitable boundaries. And I want to be free, freer than I have been before, but also in connection to myself. Not in separated fields, being fragmented and distributed, but coherent in all fields of my life. This is the process that I am involved in and that brought me to you and to this letter-writing, as part of that process.

I wish to share with you one of the many moments that prepared me for that decision. I was at a conference, one that was exceptionally baby-friendly. As the conference was organized by the Carework Network (see www.careworknetwork.org), and since care is still primarily women’s work, the majority of attendants were women. And several of them had brought their infant. I remember giving my presentation on the lack of philosophical and ethical attentiveness to pregnancy and birth, and I remember seeing a woman who had just before been breastfeeding, standing and gently rocking her baby in her arms at the far end of the room. As I spoke, she lifted her head, started to pay more and more attention to my words, and it felt as though the room full of people became the background of our personal conversation, of my talk and her reception of it which I witnessed. After the talk and Q&A she came up to the front of the room and told me what had happened to her. 

Having been an academic scholar for years, she aimed to remain primarily just that after she became a mother. Her academic work had been on carework, but she had remained an observing, interviewing, reading and studying scholar independent of her own experiences. She had separated the two worlds. And had never given it a second thought. Even while carrying her baby to a conference, she had not combined in her head and heart the two worlds that she navigated there simultaneously. She fed her baby and rocked it gently, and listened to lectures, thinking of carework and ethics, in parallel worlds. She had been there as a mother, but had also not been there as a mother: practically yes, but scholarly no.

I will not forget that moment. And I acknowledged her experience, as I too had travelled to that point. 

From a young age I had been convinced (and quite idealistic!) that studying should matter and be taken seriously. Therefore, I too had at first separated my study from my life. Perhaps you do not know this, but I studied theology in the 1980s and 1990s. At first, I was fascinated by theory. So many texts opened new worlds to me. I must say that I was really privileged. 

Studying theology in those decades and at a very special institution (I realized later) I was introduced to feminist theology as an obligatory part of the entire curriculum, as well as to womanist (black feminist) theology, liberation theology (thematizing South-American colonial history and present inequality as a result) and ecofeminism (thematizing the connection between oppression and exploitation of genders and nature). All the students followed these courses and feminist texts were included in every other course. So while studying the views of the powerful tradition of the Roman-Catholic Church, students were also challenged to think about dominance and criticisms from disempowered positions. All of the time, during the entire study program. What a privilege. 

I learned that academic work is about debate, about listening and exploring, about expressing ideas and improving them in dialogue. I learned at a young age that academic debate centres around thinking critically, challenging ideas, exploring new ways and offering critical touchstones. Usually, ideas and research questions explicitly provoke questions, wonderment, curiosity, sometimes scepticism, as a starting point of a dialogue. And this was at the heart of my study. 

It is no coincidence that I was taken by care ethics. At the moment that I learned about this very young discipline in 1993, I found myself coming home. And I have Annelies van Heijst, a feminist theologian, to thank for that. All of a sudden, ethics was about concrete, everyday, down-to-earth practices. It was about bodies, relations, growing-up and getting old, feeling well and being ill, feeling with and for others, and about a good society, which strives for equality, care for the needy, solidarity and trust. It was about everything that interested me and that belonged to me. 

Fast forward: when I found myself as an advanced scholar, having climbed the hierarchy of academia, enabled to work on my own research line of (in)fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, and new ethical questions raised since my studies, I felt invigorated. For women are still facing disadvantage from their capacity to give birth. And members of new family forms, like lesbian and gay and single-parent families, are still (and increasingly) fighting the fight for equal rights as parents. Trans persons’ rights, including their reproductive rights, are under pressure, as are the rights of migrants and refugees. Intersex and nonbinary persons are now even faced with powerful politicians denying their very existence. Now that adults of all genders have increasingly entered the workspace, this has not resulted in care being distributed more evenly by heterosexual couples. Instead, women in heterosexual families have gained not only a second shift of carework, but also a third shift of being emotionally available (as a biannual report on emancipation in the Netherlands stated). And the collective responsibility for childcare is still limited in most societies.

As part of my studies I became interested in breastfeeding. One of the books that I read was written by Phyllis L.F. Rippey. You can find it here:

https://www.mqup.ca/breastfeeding-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness-products-9780228008859.php

It opened my eyes to the politics, science and moralizing that surround breastfeeding, and the devastating impact of the formula industry worldwide. I could not believe the impact of this industry, the cruelty, exploitation, and devastation it causes. I am sure that we are going to discuss this, as you have all the science and knowledge here.

I want to end this letter on a happy note. Again: a book. On art (poetry), care (family), and breastfeeding. Doireann Ní Ghríofa wrote a fantastic price-winning book on her breastfeeding her infant and also giving her milk away for a milk bank, which has been translated in many languages:

https://doireannnighriofa.com/books/a-ghost-in-the-throat

So this is a good read for many. A must-read, actually. The text is prose, yet poetic, and takes you away to the writer’s world of childcare, breastfeeding, and her search for a historical woman. Women’s history, she writes, appears to have been written with the white ink of breastmilk, rather than the black ink of history books. I will not spoil anything further. Read and love it.

Warm regards,

Inge






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Sources of our Thoughts - Letters on the Golden Hour