From Ingrid Tilstra (she is having trouble posting for some reason)
La Leche League Canada Leader
International Board Certified Lactation Consultant

LA LECHE LEAGUE CANADA MEDIA STATEMENT RE:
"Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and 
Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad 
Policy“ by Courtney Jung

In her book, Ms. Jung asserts that encouragement to breastfeed has 
reached a “moral fervor” inconsistent with the true value of 
breastfeeding. La Leche League International (of which La Leche League 
Canada is an affiliated organization) was among the first to recognize 
the important health and emotional qualities of breastfeeding. When our 
organization began nearly sixty years ago, most babies were not 
breastfed. Research over the past sixty years has shown not 
breastfeeding has definite health risks and consequences and 
breastfeeding is now clearly understood to be the normal way to feed a 
human baby.

This deepening understanding of the importance and value of human milk 
for human babies from an immunological, physiological, and psychological 
standpoint is a result of an ever-increasing, vast, and incontrovertible 
body of research. Even though occasional studies refute or question 
certain specific qualities, the world’s scientists and health 
organizations have concluded that, overall, research definitively proves 
(and continues to prove) that breastfeeding is essential for infant and 
maternal health.

Understanding and valuing strong scientific evidence is not morality. It 
is rational, logical, and essential to any society that seeks to 
optimize its citizens’ health and well being.

Research has provided strong evidence that getting breastfeeding off to 
a good start with skin-to-skin contact and early and frequent feedings 
in the immediate postpartum period provides the foundation for a robust 
milk supply going forward. Providing expectant parents with access to 
fact-based information about breastfeeding and human milk, and a 
supportive community (medical professionals, lactation specialists and 
peer supporters like La Leche League Canada) allows them to consider and 
set their own breastfeeding goals.

It is unlikely there is any pressure in our society that could force 
intelligent women to do something for their children that doesn’t make 
sense. Mothers simply want to breastfeed because they want the best 
health for their children and themselves. We are hormonally driven and 
biologically hard-wired to breastfeed and be breastfed. We’re mammals.

Lactation and breastfeeding are the biologically normal states for human 
mothers who have given birth and human milk is the biologically normal 
food for human babies.

-- 

Barbara Robertson, MA, IBCLC, RLC
The Breastfeeding Center of Ann Arbor
bfcaa.com

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