Breastfeeding Behavior in Islam & Feminism: A Comparative View

In general, breastfeeding refers to a process of milk feeding of babies from the breast of a woman. In Islam, breastfeeding is highly recommended where the duty lies with both parents. The father is duty bound to provide milk feeding as part of the duty to maintain his child while the mother is naturally and customarily duty bound to breastfeed her baby in the case where she encounters no problem. Parents are given the option to send their babies to a wet nurse (foster mother) for suckling purposes, if the mother encounters problems or is reluctant to breastfeed her baby herself. On the other hand, although seldom addressed as a feminist issue, breastfeeding is paradigmatically one because it requires rethinking basic issues such as the sexual division of labor, the fit between women's productive and reproductive lives, and the role of physiological processes in defining gender ideology. The conceptual problems which emerge in the fit between breastfeeding promotion and feminist theory include the place of motherhood; technology versus liberation; fear of biological determinism & personal choice. Feminist theorists who take up breastfeeding as an issue and medical researchers who address questions raised by feminist theory have the occasion to produce a non-dualistic feminist problematic that would draw together a wide range of theories and practices that go beyond breastfeeding and mothering. The failure to develop this analysis could have serious consequences. upon these issues, In this paper studied breastfeeding in islamic view

Keywords:

Breastfeeding , Islam , Feminism