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From: janr@orca.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: breast feeding
Message-ID: <734@orca.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Mar-84 14:57:07 EST
Article-I.D.: orca.734
Posted: Sat Mar 24 14:57:07 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Mar-84 21:04:10 EST
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Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
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I haven't read the article in Scientific American, but I'm currently
a nursing mother and I want to add a couple comments. One--as the
discussion of this subject in net.kids has pointed out--you can find
MANY MANY people for whom breastfeeding was not a reliable contra-
ceptive. Two, "total breastfeeding," the way women in primitive
cultures do it, involves having the baby with you, strapped to your
body, at ALL TIMES and typically nursing him/her for brief periods 
(a minute or two) several times per hour, in addition to frequent
nursings throughout the night. Nursing can be an extremely satisfying 
experience, but I don't think the "primitive culture" style of nursing
will work for most American women.   

As for your concern that bottle feeding is pushed as being better,
I'd say things in America (I won't get in to the Third World Nestle formula 
situation here) aren't as bad these days as you seem to think. The
American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding as being
nutritionally superior to formula, and hospitals are
doing more to make it possible to help women who choose to nurse, like
helping you nurse immediately (on the delivery table) giving you the option
of 24-hour rooming in. I just read about a survey that found that 50% of
American babies are breastfed (it didn't say for how long, tho). It's
still the case that more educated women likelier to nurse than less 
educated women are.