Extracting Motherhood

Breast Pumps, Neoliberal Time, and the Mechanization of Maternal Labour

Abstract

This article examines how breast pumps mediate maternal experience in the early postpartum period, functioning not merely as tools of nourishment but as sociotechnical artifacts that shape subjectivity, restructure time, and redistribute labour. Drawing from feminist technoscience literature, health and medicine rhetoric, and matricentric feminist theory, the study situates pumping within neoliberal regimes of productivity, surveillance, and efficiency while foregrounding the economic and gendered inequalities that structure access to its benefits. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the study analyzes in-depth interviews with four mothers in the United States who have used breast pumps across multiple birth experiences. Their narratives reveal the pump’s dual role: enabling rest, milk donation, and shared caregiving while also imposing metric temporality, amplifying emotional fatigue, and extending maternal responsibility across new terrains. By integrating participant accounts with critical theory, the analysis shows that the pump often operates less as a tool of liberation than as a coping mechanism in the absence of structural supports. The article argues for a feminist ethics of maternal care that resists the privatization and mechanization of caregiving, and advocates for such policies as federally mandated paid leave, universal lactation accommodations, community-controlled milk-sharing systems, and public investment in caregiving infrastructure. In tracing how maternal labour is technologized, made mobile, and rendered measurable, this study contributes to feminist debates on care, embodiment, and the political economy of reproduction, reframing the pump as a site of adaptation and contestation.