Solid stuff from Kathy D - thanks.

Two points:

1. In the 1920s, KD says, most US babies were breastfed for several years.
This is emphatically not the case in the UK. Bf was the norm, but not
universal, and weaning onto a bottle was often done after a few weeks (my
own grandmother - babies born in the 1920s - did not breastfeed beyond a
few days. Her second pregnancy was twins and there was, I gather,
absolutely no question of her breastfeeding them at all. ). There are lots
of interesting social, economic, geographical factors here, to explain the
difference, but one of the main ones is, I think, the fact that the UK  was
urbanised over a greater proportion of its area sooner, so anti-bf
practices caught on quicker.

2. The rise in breast cancer (which certainly exists throughout the West)
has to be among younger women to have any connection with breastfeeding
practices down the generations...I refer to Kathy's interesting speculation
that today's women have doubly poor protection, by not having been bf
themselves and by not being breastfeeders. However, I think I am right in
saying that the greatest rise of br cancer is in the 'very old' age group,
that is the over 75s. A lot of the rise in br cancer is down to the fact
that women are living long enough to get it, rather than dying of something
else sooner.

Yet if it could be shown that women who gave birth in the 1960s and 1970s
*are* more likely to develop breast cancer than before, the speculation
could, as it were, have legs...

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK

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