What Mass Adoption of the Breast Pump is Doing to Motherhood

Technologies have given us so many blessings they are hard to even begin to quantify.

Sociologists suggest that technology has transformed society so dramatically that our great-great-grandparents day to day life had more in common with Abraham than with our modern lifestyle today.

But one of the great challenges of technology is that we pay marketers to sell us on their benefits while hiding their negative effects.

As a rule, we must remember that every technology both gives and takes away.

We often don’t even know what has been taken away until a technology has been so fully adopted that the loss, even if we decide it's too high, seems impossible to reverse.

Technologies carry with them their own vision of the world. Every technology is like an embodied idea that is creating a future world. 

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine wrote a book called “What Technology Wants” as a warning to unsuspecting humans that technology is never as simple as a neutral tool. The human + technology bi-ad too often will shape the future in the direction that serves the ideal world of that technology bringing the human along as the subservient junior partner.

All of this can seem like philosophical abstraction until we force the conversation to center around specific technologies and how they are shaping our brave new world.

So today we want to consider together a technology that has given freedom to millions of women as it went from an expensive hospital appliance used in specific instances to something mass-produced that today every new mother is expected to purchase and use daily and that technology is the breast pump.

We are particularly interested in the way technologies can subtly redefine the family and the roles within the home and now that this device is used by the majority of mothers it's worthwhile taking a step back and acknowledging both what has been gained and what has been lost.

Some of the questions we’ll explore in this episode:

• What are some of the advantages of the breast pump?

• What hidden forces have been at work making this technology so commonly used?

• What might overuse of this technology look like?

• What does this technology want? What world is it designed to create if it gains total dominance?

• How has this technology impacted the role and identity of mothers? Fathers? Babies?

• What might a world look like were we to reduce its use back to the occasions when it’s more medically necessary?