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From:
Janice Reynolds <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 9 Feb 2003 19:42:14 -0600
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Recent discusions here have given insight into the history of artificial
feeding. (Nikki Lee, Jackie Wolf).

What struck me was that women were abandoning breastfeeding, even before
others (dr's, formula co's) were offering them alternatives.  Jackie Wolf,
in her post below, notes that many societal pressures led women to seek to
abandon breastfeeding for other alternatives.

In any animal population, if the mothers in large numbers stopped nursing
their offsping, that would be a signal that the population was under extreme
stress in their environment.  I've read that throughout history, women would
make careful decisions about whether to raise their offspring, and if
resources were extememly scarce, or if the infant seemed to be unfit or
unhealthy at birth, they might abandon that child, and save their energy for
a potential offspring in the future.

In Canada, our birthrate is currently 1.4 - not anywhere near replacement.
A woman on TV yesterday (from gov't) wondered if this was due to our poor
workplace policies re: combining work and family.  I wonder if our
breastfeeding rates reflect that also.  Woman cannot make such commitments
to their children, when their own position in society is so dependant on
their value as sex objects, and as workers in the paid economy.

In Penny Van Esterick's book "Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy", she
states her goal is not to have every woman breastfeed her child, but to
create living and working conditions so that every woman can do so if she
chooses.  She says that unless we address underlying social conditions to
support breastfeeding, all our breastfeeding education campaigns or
improvements in health services are just "tweeking the system".

I think our poor breastfeeding rates are a reflection of our disfunctional
society, and perhaps should be our "canary in the coal mine" to draw
attention to how unhealthy our current society is, that women are now
refusing to nurture their children in the manner that they did for thousands
of years.

Janice Reynolds
Founder, Moms For Milk Breastfeeding Network


"As a result, they orchestrated all kinds of public health campaigns urging
women to breastfeed. But the social change that came with urbanization-more
private lives without the communal help that women in previous generations
had enjoyed, marriages based on romance rather than economics, people
working outside the home rather than within the household, and the
popularity of scheduling infant feeding prompted by factory work-all
conspired to move women to feeding their infants cows' milk." Jackie Wolf

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