Lactation, Childrearing, and Gender Justice

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss the significance of early infant feeding choices for the goal of gender justice. Focusing on human lactation practices, I identify Exclusive Gestational Nursing (EGN) as the norm in advanced industrial societies, which creates the expectation and permission for gestators, and only gestators, to nurse children, and only the children they have gestated. Through an analysis of the tasks that make up early infant care and research on the early experiences of co‐parents, I show that EGN is a factor that entrenches the specialisation of gestational mothers in childrearing and makes both equal sharing and male specialisation harder to pursue. By identifying particular features of EGN (overlaps with gestation, tethering, asymmetrical care, epistemic neglect, and voluntariness), I demonstrate that the costs of lactation as EGN are distinct from and additional to those that accrue to gestators by pregnancy alone. I conclude by pointing towards alternative lactational practices such as co‐nursing, cross‐nursing, and male lactation, which, if researched and supported, have the potential to reduce the intensity and specialisation of the nursing relationship and to further enable the adoption of early infant care by others beyond gestational mothers.