Edwina Froehlich, hero

I once asked my mother if she'd breastfed me as an infant (I was born in 1967).

She said she hadn't, that before she had come out of the general anesthesia (!) her doctor had given her for the birth process, he had already administered an injection to dry up her milk, even though she'd said she wanted to breastfeed. Can you believe? I mean, can you believe the arrogance of the medical establishment back then? Those were the days when doctors thought babies were better off consuming "scientific" formula, instead of eating what they'd been eating since time immemorial: their mother's milk. Oh, the infamy of Enfamil.

Today, we know better, and most women breastfeed for at least part of their early motherhood. Give thanks, then, to Edwina Froehlich, a co-founder of La Leche League. She died on Sunday.

As this remembrance from her local paper points out, Froehlich had nothing less to lead than a cultural revolution:

Froehlich co-founded La Leche League with a group of neighborhood women in Franklin Park during the late 1950s, teaching other mothers how to nurse their infants at a time when doctors promoted formula and breastfeeding rates were reportedly near 20 percent.

"In those days you didn't mention 'breast' in print. We knew that if we were ever going to get anything in the paper, we would have to find a name that wouldn't actually tell people what our organization was about," Froehlich once explained when telling the origin of the group's name (Spanish for "the milk"), according to biographical information provided by La Leche League.

Her Franklin Park home served as the group's original offices, and she remained closely involved over the years as La Leche grew into an international organization with 3,000 groups in more than 60 countries. Froehlich also co-authored The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which now has 2 million copies in print.

[snip]

Froehlich was inspired to take up the cause after observing her sister in labor in the early 1940s, when fathers were ushered from the hospital room, women received general anesthesia and babies were delivered via forceps.

"Mom was kind of shocked by the whole process," remarked her son, Paul Froehlich, a state representative from Schaumburg who in 2004 co-sponsored legislation allowing Illinois women to breast-feed their children in public. He also supported a state law allowing nursing mothers to excuse themselves from jury duty.

Paul Froehlich noted how norms have changed since La Leche was founded more than half a century ago. The league reports 77 percent of babies in America are now breast-fed at birth.

Here's a link to her memorial page on the La Leche League site, if you want to give a donation in her memory. As I write this in my bedroom, the sun's coming up, and on the bed behind me, our Nora is lying next to her sleeping mother, breastfeeding in her sleep. That this beautiful, natural thing is considered more or less normal in our culture is thanks in part to the life's work of Edwina Froehlich. Thank you, ma'a'm. RIP.