Over the summer, when the Trump Administration was taking children from their parents at the southern border, there were reports of at least two breast-feeding infants who had been seized from their mothers. CNN first reported the case of a Honduran immigrant whose daughter was taken away from her as she was nursing. After numerous outlets picked up the story, the Department of Homeland Security denied the allegation. “We do not separate breastfeeding children from their parents,” an official said in a statement. “That does not exist. That is not a policy. That is not something that D.H.S. does.”
It is. Last month, the Texas Tribune and Reveal, which is part of the Center for Investigative Reporting, reported on a Guatemalan migrant named Sandy who was separated from her four sons while lawfully seeking asylum in the United States. Her youngest child was exactly five months old on the day that the family, following protocol, got in line to surrender to Border Patrol. Days later, all four children were removed from Sandy’s care, including the still-nursing, months-old infant. The baby and his brothers were kept in a shelter, where they weren’t allowed to hug each other. Their mother was detained in a different state. They were separated from her for over a month.
I won’t ventriloquize Sandy, and I can’t give voice to her baby. But I have a nursing son who is five months old, the same age as Sandy’s son was when he was taken from her, and I know my baby. I know the open-mouthed, wet-lipped, big-eyed look that he gives me when he is hungry. I know the small, guttural noises he makes to tell me it’s time to nurse. When he latches on to the breast, he melts into my chest with pleasure. His exposed arm reaches up to play with my necklace, or grab my chin, or finger a hem. I know the pace at which he sucks to get the breast to let down his milk, the clicking sound of his swallow. I know how much he can drink from the left breast before wanting to move to the right.
My son doesn’t take a bottle. I know that if I were suddenly not there, and he was hungry, and someone put a bottle to his mouth, he would howl. He would get hungrier and angrier, and it would make it that much harder for him to learn this new feeding mechanism. Tears would stream down his face. And that’s before he’d even tasted the unfamiliar formula. And that’s assuming that the bottle-giver was someone he knew. I can’t imagine—or, rather, it hurts my heart to think about—how he would feel in the arms of a stranger, hungry, abandoned, alone.
At five months, my son knows me. He knows his father, sister, extended family, friends. If I am away (by which I mean, if I disappear for five minutes to the next room), he greets me on return with the most radiant smile. He has soft, doughy little cheeks and big brown eyes, and if I bring my face close enough to his, he will give me a wet kiss with messy open lips, his hands extended to grab a fistful of hair from each side of my head. When I hold his face up next to mine in the mirror, we look at ourselves together and we beam.
At five months, my baby sits like a pro, but if he gets too excited, he is liable to flop over. I know to prop pillows around him, to cushion the fall. At five months, he is teething, and I know to run a clean finger firmly over his gums, to wipe the drool from his face to keep a rash away. At five months, my baby talks to me. He has likes and dislikes, needs and desires, a schedule. When he cries at night, I know that he might be hungry, teething, anxious, in pain, or just excited about the new things he has seen that day. I can distinguish these cries, and I know how to soothe him.
It’s “medically dangerous” to separate a breast-feeding baby from a mom, Julia Belluz writes, citing the oxytocin reflex, the strength of a baby’s latch, and the risks of excruciating mastitis in the mother that can result if a baby suddenly stops nursing. It’s also unethical, torturous, and cruel. In her recent book on the science of motherhood, “Like a Mother,” Angela Garbes explains that breast-feeding literally enables “a private conversation between mother and child”: the baby’s saliva is taken into the mother’s nipple, and its contents are interpreted so that the milk’s composition can be adjusted according to the baby’s immunological needs.
I heard Sandy’s story as reported by Neena Satija and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes on the Reveal podcast. At the end of the show, after a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court judge Dana Sabraw, Sandy’s children are returned to her. Observing the bittersweet reunion, Diaz-Cortes says, “While I’m there, the baby starts coughing up formula. She used to nurse him, breast-feed him, but her milk went dry when she was in detention. After all this, Sandy can’t even feed her own kid anymore.”
When my son first started sleeping through the night, my body didn’t expect it. My breasts would fill up in expectation of his hungry little mouth. The skin would tighten, the engorged breasts would harden, a certain pain would set in. Unbidden, my breasts would leak. My clothes would smell of undrunk milk. If someone took my baby away from me and kept him away for weeks, at first my body wouldn’t know what had happened. Then my body would think him dead. Then it would grieve. After some days, my prolactin levels would return to normal, and my breasts would cease making milk. At that point, if my baby were returned to me, a part of my body would not recognize him. He would be another baby then, brought back to another mother. We could never cross back to who we’d been, on the other side of the border.
