The Big Business of Breastfeeding

When I was pregnant, one of the questions I was asked most often—by friends, relatives, even the occasional acquaintance—was whether I planned to breastfeed. Unlike so many of the more loaded questions that orbit pregnancy, this one never bothered me. My answer was always yes. Not because I had thought deeply about it, but because I hadn’t.

Then, last September, my daughter was born three and a half weeks before her due date. She was healthy—just shy of full-term—but she was small, which meant that in those early days, it was even more important to get calories into her.

At home, I spent long stretches on the couch, pumping every few hours to try and increase my supply. When I got anxious about my supply drying up, or hit some other breastfeeding snag, I found myself in an exhausted haze, going down a TikTok rabbit hole. There, I watched moms give tours of their breast milk stashes; deep freezers packed with carefully labeled bags of breast milk, hundreds of ounces stacked in tidy rows. I always found myself asking: How?

The answer was almost always found in a product. And before long, I had spent close to $1,000 on what felt like every tool imaginable for my breastfeeding arsenal. According to the gospel of 2 a.m. Reddit, if I just had that one very specific flange insert, it would change everything. I had standard electric pumps and wearable pumps and hand pumps. I had nipple ointments of every variety, hot and cold packs, and a whole bunch of other fancy items that promised to turn the drip and drop of my boobs into a full-on milk geyser.

Breastfeeding has always taken work, but what feels different now is how quickly that difficulty becomes the reason to buy something, try something, pay someone—and the subtle message that comes along with it; that with enough gear, guidance, and money, you should be able to keep going.

For something that has always been touted as natural, there are tools to increase supply, catch letdown, relieve soreness, prevent clogs, measure output, analyze milk, and optimize every step in between. There are wearable pumps and smart pumps and manual backups; lactation cookies, supplements, powders, gummies, and drinks. There are even products for your products, like pump bags disguised as work totes. Beyond that, there are the pricier layers of support: night doulas, concierge lactation consultants, text access to experts, subscription services, and apps.

Emily Oster, an economist and the founder of ParentData, tells me that a lot of this stems from both real need and rising expectations. “There is a lot of value to many of these technologies if you want to make this work,” Oster says. “And yet, it has also led to people feeling like, well, okay, there’s no excuse.”

Feeding a baby can quickly become something discussed in ounces, output, and gear. The moms on TikTok show exactly how much they pump in each session, along with the right pump, a power-pumping routine, or a lactation treat to get there.

As Oster puts it to me, once breastfeeding becomes something measurable—something you can count, log, store, and compare—it also becomes “something to monitor,” “something to worry about,” or “a way to compete.”

What all of these products are really filling, sociologist Caitlyn Collins tells me, is a much deeper lack of support. In the U.S., new mothers are often left alone to figure things out—without enough time off, without consistent, affordable help, and without the kind of built-in support from family or community that would make those early months, and the questions that come with breastfeeding, more manageable. The result is that many women end up piecing together answers on their own, often before their bodies, schedules, or feeding plans have fully stabilized. In Collins’s words, “Products and services do not make a community. They help ease the hurt of living without one.”

There are the emotional costs—and also the financial ones. A 2023 study from Yale researchers found that when you account for supplies, extra food, and the time required to sustain breastfeeding, it can cost mothers upwards of $10,000 a year—hardly the free, natural arrangement it’s made out to be.

And that number still doesn’t fully capture the intangible, from lost time and income to the mental load of breastfeeding. A feeding or pumping session can last 15 to 30 minutes, often six to eight times a day early on; over time, that labor starts to resemble a part-time—if not full-time—job. As Oster notes, “Breastfeeding's not free unless you think people’s value of time is zero.”

To be fair, some of these newer tools really do help. For a long time, mothers were expected to make do with products that felt clinical, clunky, or barely designed with them in mind. In many cases, women-founded brands have stepped in to make things that feel less awkward and more usable. One friend used the same wearable device across multiple kids, making it possible to pump for one while sitting in the school drop-off line for another. Another swore by a few well-designed nursing basics and a pillow that made feeding more comfortable—small things, but enough to keep her going well past the six-month mark she had set for herself. There's also the reality that women's lives have shifted—they have careers and are going to back to work—and that means their needs have, too. Many products have emerged to help fill those gaps. For these women, it's the tools that make breastfeeding possible.

By the end of those early postpartum months, what felt clearest to me was not that any of it was bad, but that once a system offers parents enough products, strategies, and expert interventions, it can begin to feel as though there is no acceptable reason to stop looking for the next best thing.

Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence tells me she wished she could have let go of the idea that breastfeeding not working out meant she was failing her child “in this extremely catastrophic way.” She adds, “Not everyone can actually fix or improve their breastfeeding experience, and that might be sad, but it’s okay.”

That is what makes perfectionism especially cruel in early motherhood: it can so easily disguise itself as devotion. For all the products out there, mothers can still be left startlingly alone, asking at nearly every turn whether they’re doing enough. It will take a culture shift to change that, and well, that's not something you can buy.