I just wanted to put in my $.02 on this subject. For all you advocates out there, I think it's a political act to refer to the act as "breastfeeding" rather than "breast-feeding" or "breast feeding." The latter two versions clearly try to make an equivalence with bottle feeding, and to my way of thinking, stress the idea of feeding over the idea of the breast. For this reason, my own personal preference terminologically speaking is "nursing," which in connotatation & etymology suggests the act of nurturing as well as nourishing. (I recognize for cultural reasons, this term is not as universally applicable, e.g. in England "nursing" means more exclusively to care for an ill person.) As a scholar of medieval language and literature in a past phase of my life, I can attest to the long and glorious history of the word that takes the modern English form "to nurse"--and unlike "to breastfeed" it is a word that describes both the action of mother and the action of baby; a truer reflection of the reciprocal nature of the relationship involved. --Penny Piercy, LLLL, MOM (Patrick 2 1/2) from Bloomington, IN (also B.A., M.A., and A.B.D. in English)