Dear Ms. Gray,
        I was very disappointed to see your commentary "Beyond
Breastfeeding."  You must not be keeping up with the research on the
monumental differences this one decision makes over the course of a lifetime
-- on a child's life-long health, their cognitive development, and their
emotional development.  Choosing to breastfeed your child is the *single
most important thing you can do* to insure a healthy and happy life for your
child.  Formula feeding increases your child's risks of SIDS, cancer, heart
disease, ADHD, multiple sclerosis, ear infections, asthma, and on and on and
on.  Formula feeding reduces your child's IQ by a small, but consistent and
statistically significant increment.  You don't know ahead of time how smart
your child will be, whether they will be mentally retarded, or brilliant, or
have a head injury or an illness such as a brain tumor or meningitis that
affects their cognitive functioning.  Five IQ points on the high end of the
scale may have no functional significance.  Five IQ on the the low end of
the scale can mean the difference between independent living and a group
home for the mentally impaired.  If your child dies of SIDS because it was
formula-fed, I'd say that was a fairly life-changing event for both the dead
child and for that child's parents and siblings.  If your son develops
diabetes in mid-childhood, or your grown daughter develops breast cancer,
you will always wonder if it might have been because they were formula-fed
-- talk about feeling guilty!!
        Breastfeeding is much more than nutrition -- it is an intimate,
close, loving, physical and emotional relationship between mother and child.
It results in different kinds of children, and different relationships with
those children, than can be gotten by formula-feeding.  Partly this is
because breastfeeding releases the normal mothering hormones of oxytocin and
prolactin, which create a different type of mother, and different kinds of
relationships between mothers and children that you just don't find without
these hormones.  This is well-documented by research.  Long after a child
has stopped breastfeeding, even if it breastfed for several years, the
health and cognitive benefits continue to affect the child's quality of
life, and the relationship between mother and child.  A child breastfed for
several years has a normal brain, a normal immune system, a normal sense of
self.
        A mother should have access to complete and accurate information
about the consequences of this decision, the single most important decision
she has to make about raising her child.  She should have support to
breastfeed from those around her.  She should understand exactly what risks
she is taking by choosing to bottle-feed.  I think if mothers actually had
access to this information and to support, we would see the vast majority of
mothers breastfeeding.  Who would choose to put their child at risk?
        You say "it isn't child abuse" -- perhaps not, not if you define
child abuse as deliberating doing something to harm your child because you
want to harm your child.  However, formula-feeding in the absence of any
good reason to do so (and there are some) should be considered "reckless
endangerment," akin to driving drunk with your child in the car, or failing
to use a car seat, or drinking while pregnant -- doing something you know is
*likely* to harm your child, even though you don't wish harm to come to the
child.
        We need to start worrying more about children's health, and their
right to be breastfed, and less about whether mothers feel guilty for
choosing formula, knowing that it will harm their children.  Articles like
yours, by claiming that formula is risk-free, take away a mother's right to
make an informed choice about this issue.  If I had a few minutes to spend
with a mother, I would talk about the importance of breastfeeding,
breastfeeding, and breastfeeding.  If I had a few more minutes, I would talk
about the importance and health benefits of co-sleeping, and carrying the
baby on its mother's body as much as possible.  Car seats are important, but
most mothers already get adequate education about that.  I wouldn't worry
about high-risk sports when talking to a potential mother -- there is plenty
of time for education about that topic, as well as sex and drugs and
rock-n-roll in later years.  But mothers need to know before labor and
delivery that choosing to breastfeed is the only responsible choice to be
made.  She needs time to get her support system in place, to rearrange her
life, and to learn about how to breastfeed.
        In the final accounting, only the mother can choose to breastfeed
her child, and some will choose not to, or not to for very long.  But if it
were left up to the babes, they would ALL choose breastfeeding for several
years -- every single one of them.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html