I am likewise so pleased to see this slowly coming "shift," if you will in language about breastfeeding and formula use. Truly, it baffles me that the burden of proof has been placed on the shoulders of breast milk/breastfeeding for so many decades (and seemed to happen very abruptly when it did, do you all think?). I am sure I am preaching to the choir on these comments...An attitude of "prove to me that breast milk is 'better' than formula" seems to have been quite pervasive in the health care provider world and the world of science as well as the family/consumer worlds. Many providers, scientists and parents apparently are still incredulous about the differences. The part that continuously baffles me is that breast milk and breastfeeding have been around for thousands of years, while formula only a very small fraction of that time, yet "we" have to prove "superiority?" And it is reduced to "superiority" and "inferiority," rather than completeness and incompleteness.  

We know there are specific risks to formula use, and what is a distinctly separate, yet interrelated issue is that there are also risks to *withholding* breastfeeding...these are two different risks, yet are so intertwined. Just like any intervention or substitution, in order to receive the greatest benefit, the individual must already be *at risk*, and those benefits must outweigh the risks, yet the benefits still don't make the risks disappear either. Applying an intervention across the board leads to greater risks for those who were not at risk to begin with, and it continues...Women deserve to be given the facts, in love and in gentleness, but desperately deserve the facts. 

I have a gratefulness for many discoveries of modern science, but here is one of those times where science cannot improve upon what is complete and fitting as it stands...yet it tries! It reminds me of how when we take something out of its whole context, break it into parts and try to put it back together, we come short and are left scratching our heads.


Deborah Wetherill, RN BSN, CCCE, Lact Counselor
Colorado 

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