Mother Earth: Climate Justice, Infant Feeding Decisions, and Intimacy

ABSTRACT

Human infants require milk. This can be parental milk provided directly from the parent's body (known as breastfeeding, chestfeeding, or nursing), expressed human milk, or infant formula milk. This article contributes to the literature on the ethics of infant feeding in two ways. First, it brings recent research on the climate impact of infant feeding decisions into a conversation which has hitherto focused on the benefits to the child. Second, it identifies a new concern with defeasible duties to nurse – namely, they are duties to engage in prolonged, frequent, and deeply intimate bodily interactions. There are strong objections to duties to engage in prolonged, frequent, and deeply intimate bodily interactions. These intimacy‐based objections mean that current estimates of the climate impact of infant feeding decisions do not support a defeasible duty to nurse, either alone or in conjunction with other benefits of nursing. Moreover, consideration of intimacy makes the rejection of defeasible duties to nurse more resilient. Future arguments that there is a defeasible duty to nurse must show that the considerations in favour of such a duty outweigh the strong default against duties to engage in intimate bodily activities.