This article described incidents where breastfed babies, born to young, poor
mothers have died of malnutrition. It seems to me that these articles always
imply that breastfeeding was somehow at fault, that if the mothers had been
bottlefeeding the baby would have lived. But the truth is (and I worked for
two different Children's Aid Societies for a total of nine years) that many,
many bottlefed babies die of malnutrition or are diagnosed with failure to
thrive. Of the dozen or so cases I knew about, not one involved
breastfeeding. I remember one of our staff members attending a seminar on
recognizing failure to thrive and malnutrition in infants, and breastfeeding
was not even mentioned during the entire session! We need to recognize that
the problem is a lack of knowledge about baby care (and, in these U.S. case,
lack of access to health care) and not just a breastfeeding problem.