Intimate Synthetic Entanglements
Ani LiuShortly after I finished breastfeeding my son, I learned that researchers had found microplastics in human breastmilk.In a study published last year in Polymers, researchers detected microplastic contamination in the majority of breastmilk samples from healthy mothers. See Antonio Ragusa et al., “Raman Microspectroscopy Detection and Characterisation of Microplastics in Human Breast Milk,” Polymers 14, no. 13 (2022): 2700–2713. It was a startling revelation; like many mothers, I went to great lengths to breastfeed. Considered one of the most nutritious foods for a baby, breastmilk is custom made by the lactating body for each individual baby. In addition to calories and vitamins, it contains antibodies and culture-specific flavor molecules.Joanne M. Spahn et al., “Influence of Maternal Diet on Flavor Transfer to Amniotic Fluid and Breast Milk and Children’s Responses: A Systematic Review,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 109, no. 1 (2019): 1003–1026. And as I now know, also tiny particles of polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, and polypropylene.
We have colonized the Earth with plastics, and now these plastics are colonizing our bodies in the most intimate of ways. Microplastics have been found in our blood,R. L. Kuhlman, “Discovery and Quantification of Plastic Particle Pollution in Human Blood,” Environment International 167 (2022): 107199–107206. our lungs, even our placentas.Antonio Ragusa et al., “Plasticenta: First Evidence of Microplastics in Human Placenta,” Environment International 146 (2021): 106274–106281. Even more intimately, some plastic molecules mimic the shape of our own hormones, becoming endocrine disruptors. Bisphenol A (BPA), polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and phthalates have a molecular shape so similar to hormone structures that our bodies are tricked into thinking they are hormones. This is a kind of simulation with real implications—it can block our hormones from functioning correctly and can cause cancer, diabetes, neurological impairment, and reproductive disorders.
While the effects of our industrial processes on climate change and ecological destruction are well known, most people turn a blind eye until the realization that plastic colonization has infiltrated their own bodies. These individualistic beliefs are harmful: after all, we live in a complexly woven net of interdependence. What is considered an individual body is actually a rich community of other species we call a microbiome, which we could not survive without. To thrive, we exist in an ecology of cooperation, in complex relationships beyond human to human: with plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, minerals, climate. The impact of our activities on these entities should be enough to awaken us to change, but perhaps it is not until our own bodies are notably impacted that we feel compelled to change.
That microplastics exist in placentas and breastmilk entered my news feed around the same time that abortion rights were challenged in the United States. Where I live, the constitutional right to abortion ended in 2022 when the Supreme Court abandoned its duty to protect this fundamental right. So, what of plastics and bans? These two simultaneous realities swirl together in my head: we are forcing people with uteruses to bear and care for children as our capacity to care for our planet—and even for ourselves—is strained. In the context of both plastics and reproductive rights, seemingly intimate acts between bodies are urgently re-entangled into the larger systems they exist in. The private body and the social body are both compromised in these toxic transgressions.
In recent years, the rallying cry for bodily autonomy, “My Body My Choice!,” has come to mean many things for many people across the political spectrum. For some, it remains the ability to choose healthcare for one’s own uterus, including abortion; for others, the ability to choose whether or not to receive a vaccine. And yet, as microplastics and endocrine disruptors course through our bodies, it also signifies no choice at all—or, rather, to what shouldn’t be a choice at all: the collective, shared right to parent or remain childfree “in safe and healthy environments.”Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 9.
In a study published last year in Polymers, researchers detected microplastic contamination in the majority of breastmilk samples from healthy mothers. See Antonio Ragusa et al., “Raman Microspectroscopy Detection and Characterisation of Microplastics in Human Breast Milk,” Polymers 14, no. 13 (2022): 2700–2713.
Joanne M. Spahn et al., “Influence of Maternal Diet on Flavor Transfer to Amniotic Fluid and Breast Milk and Children’s Responses: A Systematic Review,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 109, no. 1 (2019): 1003–1026.
R. L. Kuhlman, “Discovery and Quantification of Plastic Particle Pollution in Human Blood,” Environment International 167 (2022): 107199–107206.
Antonio Ragusa et al., “Plasticenta: First Evidence of Microplastics in Human Placenta,” Environment International 146 (2021): 106274–106281.
Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 9.
