The Final Call

Mother's milk, breast feeding and healthy societies

By Abdul Alim Muhammad, MD | Last updated: Dec 1, 2009 - 8:35:10 AM

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(FinalCall.com) - Where women are elevated and honored and respected and well taken care of, there is a society that will flourish and prosper and endure.

It is not only milk that flows during the feeding of an infant or child at the breast. It is also the culture and wisdom of the society in which the women live that also flows to the young life suckling at her breast.

If she sings lovingly to her baby, or speaks soft words of encouragement and calmness, she is inculcating the values and cultural principles of her society into the baby.

If she recounts the history and legends of her people then she is extending national life, the life of her people and creating one who will pick up the baton and continue the dramatic historical action of her people in their struggle to survive.

If the baby can find sustenance enough to thrive and survive with abundance in the first stages of life at its mother's breast, then that becomes the first chapter of a life that will be characterized by vibrant health, happy optimism, keen intelligence, personal power, psychological security and boundless success.

The enemy of God must discourage and distract the woman from performing her primary duty to her child.

The enemy will engage in lying propaganda that will cause the woman to feel a mixture of shame and disgust at the prospect of being a mother, to make her feel that motherhood is a second or third class activity that should be ranked second or third to career and other pursuits. Feminist views will cause her to seek competitive roles with men, instead of finding the high ground of true feminine power: the creation and nurturing of new human life in the image and likeness of God.

The enemy will construct society in such a way, that the woman will find no place for her maternal instincts and needs. She will find no nursing station in public spaces, or any support for her special maternity needs and post-partum needs as a nursing mother.

In fact, she is liable to be abused both at home and abroad and made to feel that she needs to “get back into the swing of things” as fast as possible. Just like in slavery days, this modern working woman is back on the “plantation” almost immediately, the baby dropped off for care and feeding from strangers, while she focuses her time and attention on more important things.

Often times, even when the mother is willing to breast feed, the ambient stress of modern life is so overwhelming that the delicate bio-feedback mechanisms upon which successful breast feeding depends are disrupted and breast- feeding must be abandoned prematurely. This forces the unnatural and harmful advancement of the baby's diet that sets the stage for all manner of medical and psychological/behavioral problems, such as eczema, asthma, allergies, rickets, weak immunity with frequent colds, fevers and infections, not to mention social maladaptation, insecurity, resentment, hatred and distrust.

The consequent gap that develops between mother and child can never after that be closed and becomes the stark cold alienation so commonly noted in today's society especially among youth. They experience problems in forming and maintaining relationships. Deprived of the primary source of love and affection themselves, they haven't got a clue about how to show it to others. Hence, a life characterized by the wreckage of troubled and disastrous relationships of all sorts including the skyrocketing rate of divorce, the root cause of which seems mysterious and unaccounted for.

There is the pervasive feeling that something is missing, but just what it is, the individual hasn't got a clue. That is because it isn't something that was done to the child, but what never took place that is beyond the knowing of the child.

The child does not realize what should have happened and can only attempt to understand what did occur. This nagging sense of “something wrong” often leads to depression and a sense of despair that can have very evil consequences. Or it can simply lead to a life that seems pointless and going nowhere. The search for the missing essence can lead to alcoholism, drugs and all kinds of unsavory and even anti-social behaviors in vain attempts to compensate. As the song goes, “looking for love in all the wrong places.”

Listed above are pretty much the ills of current society. These ills can be directly traced to the diminution of the role of women as homemakers and mothers who breastfed and raised their own children and forced by exceedingly evil forces to become cogs in the corporate wheels of commerce. The majority of women today have become wage slaves just like the men. In this degraded state things fall apart. The miracle of milk, the milk that flows from the breast of a healthy loving mother is the panacea that can literally save our world.

(Abdul Alim Muhammad, M.D., is the Nation of Islam minister of health.)