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 *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html