If we position that formula and bottle feeding, are only a predominant 
method of feeding over the past 150 years or so...

Then the vast majority of babies prior to this date, were breastfed.  
That would include Genghis Khan, all the Ceasars, including Caligula and 
people like Pontius Pilate and Herod.

Who knows, Hitler might have been breastfed, certainly many of his 
generals were.  The invading European armies in North & South America, 
who decimated the local peoples, were all breastfed.  Every single 
mother who foot bound her baby daughter in China, was breastfed, and 
many breastfeeding the baby as she bound the infant feet.

If we look at Africa, as a continent, and some of the countries 
currently in never ending genocide, the majority proportion of the young 
men killing, raping and torturing young women today, were breastfed.  
Many of the young men putting tyres around the necks of other young men, 
and setting fire to them, were breastfed.

Breastfeeding has to be pretty entrenched in a culture, for an invading 
soldier to cut the lactating breasts off a mother prior to raping her, 
in order to make sure she never feeds her own baby again.  These 
atrocities do happen, and they happen at the hands of young men who were 
breastfed.  Some of them are children, taught to murder as young as 7 or 8.

In the Continuum Concept, Leidloff cites another indigenous tribe, side 
by side with the one she lived with.  In that tribe, the mothers 
breastfeed only when the babies screamed with hunger, took the breast 
away the second the baby came off, carried the babies in wicker baskets 
and did not touch them, and weaned abruptly at six months. She describes 
this tribe as being aggressive and nasty. I can look at that and see a 
'survival of the fittest' scenario, for surely many of these babies 
sickened and died.  Many of our breastfeeding cultures treat babies 
harshly, and look away when they die.  Some still bury children alive in 
the forest, if they have survived with a blemish or impairment.  
Currently, a lot of breastfed as babies adults are hammering nails into 
the heads of their breastfed children to let the demons out.

Breastfeeding does not make nicer people.  Love, security, respect and 
tolerance make nicer people: usually.  Lack of breastfeeding may impact 
on some.  However, breastfeeding itself, will not obviate a cruel and 
unforgiving childhood.  Ask the Ezzos.

As we keep saying, it's not the nutrition, it's the love... the love is 
not exclusive to breastfeeding, nor impossible without it.  If you are 
breastfed and baby worn for the first three years of life, but also see 
your father beat your mother every day, and get a sound beating yourself 
if you don't do as your told, and forcibly weaned overnight... are you 
going to be a nicer person for being breastfed?  Or has breastfeeding no 
hope of overcoming cruelty and degradation?

If you have love, respect, tolerance and gentleness AND breastfeeding, 
are you automatically going to be a nicer person?  I think the odds are 
good, but they are only odds.  Someone reading this, knows their 
alcoholic, abusive rapist son, who is in jail, had all this going for 
them, and still turned down the wrong path.   Just like someone else in 
here is married to a man dragged up by his boot straps by an abusive 
family, formula fed and left to CIO, and beaten.. but who is a wonderful 
loving partner and superb father.

Just like many of us are breastfeeding through our own pain over our own 
childhoods, and looking at other women who had great childhoods who are 
formula feeding, and we weep inside for what their child is missing out 
on. I'm pretty sure in my mind that a breastfed on demand, bed shared, 
baby worn and self weaned child is going to be calmer and more resilient 
and more responsive to others, than a baby from the same background who 
wasn't breastfed.  As that baby is going to have had a lot more skin to 
skin, have been held more, had more independent experience of having 
their needs met, and filling them themselves, and is biologically hard 
wired for calm.  They're also going to have made every scrap of their 
genetic inheritance count.  But I do know such kids who were bottle fed, 
as their mother worked her ass off making sure the baby was securely 
attached and was always met by responsive parenting.  But the 
responsively parented breastfed one will have that extra calm, usually.  
All you can do is put it in place and hope the odds bounce right on yours!

Lack of breastfeeding certainly represents a 'lack' in a childhood.  
Thankfully, as a species, individuals are good at overcoming 'lack' with 
perseverance.  But it is exceptionally painful to watch the kids with 
the 'lack' in the playground, next to the ones with the normal 
experience.  I just switch my mind to the future for those kids, and 
wonder how many will successfully overcome their lack and turn out just 
fine.  This also means closing down the future health bit, and wondering 
which ones are going to intensive care, or the graveyard, sooner than 
they might have otherwise gone.  That hurts far more than seeing their 
less resilient playground activities.  The thought that the child on the 
slide is going to drop with a heart attack from lack of breastfeeding 
when he is himself a father to a young baby... oh boy, that chills me to 
the bone.  All our kids deserve all they can be.

We have got a pretty clear history behind us, of murder, violence, war, 
rape, torture and suffering.  All by people who were breastfed.

Good job we've also got a clear history of love, striving, excellence, 
respect, compassion and gentleness.  All by people who were breastfed.

Humans!  Contrary, terrifying, uplifting.  :-)   All we can do is play 
the odds... and hope. (Some might say pray!)

Morgan Gallagher

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