Dakota Meyer met Bristol Palin at a taping of her mother’s reality show in 2014, and by the following March, he had gotten down on one knee at a Rascal Flatts concert in Vegas. Less than a week before their planned Memorial Day wedding, however, the couple split. The next month, Palin announced she was pregnant. Sailor Grace was born in December, and the relationship between her parents has since devolved into a custody dispute.
So far, so Palin. But here’s where things get interesting: Palin objected to overnight visits for Meyer because two-and-a-half-month-old Sailor is still breastfeeding, and long separations between mother and child would disrupt that schedule. Now the Daily Mail reports that an Alaska judge has granted the Kentucky-based Meyer two four-day periods of custody each month, against Bristol’s request.
Only a few states explicitly address breastfeeding in their custody laws, but it is not an unusual point of conflict between warring parents. Judges in any state can take it into consideration when crafting custody agreements. J. Kathleen Marcus, a Pennsylvania lawyer who is an expert on breastfeeding and the law, told me by email that breastfeeding is an issue that comes up often in custody disputes. But it rarely has a major impact on decisions, which are almost always left up to the discretion of the judge or custody hearing office. “Palin’s case is the norm and not the exception,” she concluded.
Sure enough, the judge who ruled on Palin’s case had an answer for her breastfeeding dilemma: “Mother is to provide father with an adequate supply of milk or formula for overnight visitation.” This may sound like an obvious solution. But as a person who is currently breastfeeding—well, not right this minute—I can vouch for the fact that it’s not necessarily that simple. My daughter, for example, refuses to drink from a bottle. That means if I want her to drink breast milk, I can’t leave her side for more than three or four hours at a time. For most women, slowing down a breastfeeding schedule leads to a lower supply of milk. Pumping helps, but many find it uncomfortable and inconvenient. (At least it’s no longer prohibitively expensive: Thanks to the ACA, breast pumps are now free for most women.)
Palin’s custody case highlights the question of whether “breastfeeding” is the same thing as “drinking breast milk.” Not so long ago, the most significant benefit of breastfeeding was thought to be the bonding time for mother and child: the skin-to-skin contact, the 3 a.m. snuggling, the weirdly intense eye contact. But today, most public health campaigns and policy initiatives focus on the scientific superiority of the liquid itself. New York City’s 2012 “Latch On NYC” campaign, for example, didn’t emphasize breastfeeding at all, instead touting slogans like “Nothing compares with breast milk.” As political scientist Courtney Jung writes in her 2015 book Lactivism, the emphasis on breast milk over -feeding is good for the -pump industry. It’s also good for employers who can hustle women back to work without appearing to interfere with their breastfeeding plans. And yes, it’s good for many women. As long as a mother can pump and someone else can hold a bottle, in other words, a modern baby can drink breast milk anywhere. But as Jung writes, there’s still no research that distinguishes between the benefits of drinking human milk and feeding at the human breast. And for the women who treasure breastfeeding for reasons that go beyond the transfer of calories from mother to baby, that’s a distinction that matters.
Palin says she has been breastfeeding Sailor overnight; now that routine will be disrupted during Sailor’s visits with her father. That’s not to say the judge’s order in is unreasonable. If the baby already drinks from bottles, and Palin already pumps, it may be the best possible solution to allow Sailor to spend time with her father. But as with just about anything related to breastfeeding, that doesn’t make it easy.
