While a lot of this isn’t wrong, I really think that we need to push back on the idea that breast milk is by any means free.
Breast milk is not even free in the sense of ‘not costing anything.’ Breast milk requires calories, vitamins, nutrition. There’s a reason why even WIC gives breastfeeding parents more nutrition. IDK what it is now, but back in the day as a breastfeeding parent I got carrots, extra milk, and tuna fish, because even government programs which are notorious at underestimating what people actually need to survive, let alone thrive, recognize that breast milk is not by any means free. It doesn’t come out of the ether, it is produced by a body which converts food into other food. Breastfeeding parents need to eat more food and drink more liquid, which means they need more clean and safe liquids to drink, they need more protein, they need more iron, they need more everything, because the process of producing breast milk requires protein and liquid and vitamins to go into the breast milk, and requires protein and liquid to fuel the parent’s body for the process of producing and delivering that milk.
Breast milk is only free if you don’t value the work of breastfeeding parents: the time that it takes to pump or feed, the fact that breastfeeding creates a schedule that a body has to adhere to because the body begins to understand 'I have to produce this much food at this time’, creating an obligation of time from that parent compared to the other. Breast milk is only free if you don’t value that labor, which, like, clearly as a culture we do not.
None of which undoes the fact that promoting formula-feeding over breastfeeding was in fact pushed as the 'civilized’ choice over the past century. Like, yes, there was definitely and still is propaganda that you only breastfed if you were a lower-class person who couldn’t afford the more scientifically-advanced option of formula, that breastfeeding will 'ruin’ your breasts and body, etc. etc. All of that is true.
But. Breastfeeding is not free, and we need to stop saying it is free. It is not. That is not a word that should ever be used in relation to breastfeeding under any circumstances. If you wish to say that breastfeeding does not require you to go out and buy a single, specified product from a corporation, then say that, but do not say that breastfeeding is free. When @mistresskabooms was an infant, I literally could not be away from her for more than two hours without stopping to pump or otherwise express milk, because my body became tuned to how much food she needed and if I didn’t stop and express milk, well, I’d fucking overflow wherever I was. I had an obligation to her which my co-parents did not have, and an inability to be away from her which my co-parents did not have. That was labor which deserves to be recognized and understood and never, not even briefly, brushed over or relegated to “free” or “valueless.”
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