ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Contaminated Mothers”: Breast Milk Biomonitoring and the Gendered Politics of Embodied Risk from Michigan to Akwesasne, 1973-1999

• In Event: Gendered Innovations and Limitations

English Abstract

“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” released by the Trump Administration in May 2025, warns that an “aggregation of environmental chemicals” is contributing to an alarming health crisis for the country’s children. It highlights breast milk as an important mode of exposure to a wide range of persistent organic pollutants. Concerns about the accumulation and transfer of toxicants in breast milk arose in the mid-twentieth century. Breast milk biomonitoring studies accelerated in the United States and globally in the following decades, ultimately becoming a cornerstone of the international data infrastructure to assess human health and progress towards pollution reduction. Yet, despite breast milk’s symbolic resonance, such biomonitoring efforts have not resulted in sustained alarm nor unequivocal, actionable insights for environmental regulation and health decision-making. In this paper, I examine two sites of breast milk biomonitoring conducted in the wake of large-scale environmental contamination between 1973 and 1999: Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation at Akwesasne. I ask: How did activists, scientists, and others balance surveillance of toxicity in breast milk with breastfeeding guidance? Where do these actors locate risk? How do different politicizations of motherhood in environmental activism reveal a multiplicity of epistemologies of risk? I suggest breast milk biomonitoring illuminates negotiations of environmental and reproductive politics, where invocations of “motherhood” as a political resource yield uneven consequences and where scientific knowledge production is inseparable from the complicated emotional and political landscapes it helps produce.

Author

• Abigail Higgins, Harvard University