I love Pamela Morrison, Barbara Wilson-Clay, Natalie Rawlings Kraut, and 
Rachel Myr’s recent comments on this thread.
 
Pamela wrote:
< we might not automatically need to blame the hospital practices and 
policies in the North/West for all that goes wrong with breastfeeding.>
 
Does anyone else remember the report that Mike Woolridge made about one of 
his studies in rural Thailand? Because it was the hospital routine to 
separate mothers and babies for many hours after birth, his group went to 
some trouble to arrange a study in which the experimental group was assisted 
to begin breastfeeding “early,” which I think was within four hours of 
birth.  Lo and behold, when they followed up with moms and babies from both 
the experimental and control groups, everybody was nursing fine!  The 
researchers concluded that in the extremely supportive breastfeeding culture 
of the area, “early” contact was not a necessary part of normal infant 
feeding, although studies done in Western/Northern non-supportive 
environments had found that it made a big difference.  In other words, it 
wasn’t broke, so they didn’t need to fix it!
 
Chris Mulford
Eastern USA

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