Amichai Levy
- Breastfeeding offers numerous health benefits. but it's also time-consuming and can be painful and frustrating.
- On top of the physical demands, women face other barriers to breastfeeding, including a lack of maternity leave and the right to pump at work.
- Insider collected photos from readers and professional photographers that reflect the realities of breastfeeding, from carting around a pump and tandem breastfeeding to dealing with infections.
According to Instagram, breastfeeding is mostly a blissful bonding experience, where the baby snuggles in closely to the mother to drink up a perfect food that offers numerous health benefits.
But Instagram influencers tend to omit the less photogenic parts of the process — the bloody nipples, struggling to produce enough milk, getting engorged from having too much milk, facing painful medical issues like mastitis, stressing about a baby who can't latch, or never getting a break from a baby who solely feeds from the breast.
There's balancing a feeding baby on one arm while taking a work call in the other and having to lug around pump parts while trying to find a private room with a working lock.
Many mothers who endure the physical discomforts still can't continue breastfeeding due to widespread societal barriers. Across the globe, only 41% of babies were exclusively breastfed throughout their first six months of life in 2018, which is the recommendation of the World Health Organization. It's one of the few positive health behaviors that has higher rates in poorer countries than rich countries. That's due in large part to a lack of maternity leave policies and protections in the workplace for lactating mothers.
Insider collected photos from readers and two photographers — Sophie Darwin and Justine Curran — who captured the pain and frustration that often comes with breastfeeding, along with the glee a mom can experience from being able to feed her baby from her own body.
"What I love about capturing real life scenarios of breastfeeding is that it shares all the challenges that may arise with breastfeeding," Justine Curran, a Sydney, Australia-based photographer, told Insider. "Women need to know they are not alone."