SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
In 2013, 81.1 percent of U.S. mothers said they started out breast-feeding their baby. That's up from 75 percent in 2008, and 70 percent in 2000, according to the CDC.
[...] 52 percent of U.S. mothers said they were still breast-feeding their infants when the babies were 6 months old, and 30 percent said they were still breast-feeding when the babies reached 1 year.
How should society handle breastfeeding in public and the workplace? Should there be any restrictions on the age of the child?
Breastfeeding has obvious benefits for a child's development, but breast milk is also a fluid of the body that can carry disease.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-still-breastfeeds-daughter-aged-4881835
http://www.livescience.com/55846-breast-feeding-mothers-united-states.html
(Score: 2, Disagree) by schad on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:13PM
The mere fact that something has been done for a long time doesn't prove or even imply that it's better than modern alternatives. All it does is prove that it's no more harmful to the chances of successful reproduction than the alternatives.
In this case, the only pre-modern alternative to breast feeding was... nothing. It doesn't take much to beat death. I suppose we could have evolved to vomit half-digested food into the mouths of our children, but evolution isn't really under our conscious control. We evolved to breast feed; that was good enough for us not to go extinct. The end.
I can't speak to what things were like in the 70s and 80s. But today, there is an absolutely insane amount of pressure on women to breast feed. Not just to do it, but to enjoy it. If you don't enjoy breast feeding, basically, you're a monster. There is something terribly wrong with you. You have post-partum depression, or you're selfish and impatient, or you're too lazy to try to make it work properly -- and those latter two reasons mean you shouldn't be permitted to have kids, you disgusting, reprehensible, utter failure of a woman.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:49PM
Quite true. However, decades of research do in fact imply that in this case, breastfeeding is better.
Based on said decades of research that have determined that breastfeeding is good for the baby and probably good for mom too. As for enjoying it, all I can say is that every mother I've known whose breastfed their children enjoyed it most of the time.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 24 2016, @05:41PM
But today, there is an absolutely insane amount of pressure on women to breast feed.
Based on said decades of research that have determined that breastfeeding is good for the baby and probably good for mom too.
Yes, but in the grand scheme of things you can do to ensure better outcomes for your baby, breastfeeding's benefits aren't really very strong. The proven effects for breast milk are even less, yet how many young mothers spend time nowadays stressing out with a breast pump rather than spending that time holding and interacting with their child (which almost certainly has more benefits than the breast milk itself). There are a number of recent studies, in fact, which suggest that most of the "benefits" of breastfeeding are potentially due to sample bias. (See my post above.)
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:51PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 24 2016, @05:30PM
In this case, the only pre-modern alternative to breast feeding was... nothing. It doesn't take much to beat death.
Not true. Almost every human culture around the world has a history of "wet-nurses." Yes, when we think of them today, it probably conjures up an image of an aristocratic woman who hands off her child to someone poor woman to feed. But historically, this practice also existed to help out mothers in a village who couldn't produce enough milk for their own child. It's only in our modern "isolated" world that's squeamish about bodily fluids that we find such a practice to be weird. Yet that puts way too much pressure on mothers, and some of them just don't have enough milk. (Also, obviously breastfeeding can transmit diseases and such, so I'm not necessarily encouraging a return to co-nursing, only noting that there were pre-modern alternatives other than death.)
But today, there is an absolutely insane amount of pressure on women to breast feed. Not just to do it, but to enjoy it. If you don't enjoy breast feeding, basically, you're a monster. There is something terribly wrong with you. You have post-partum depression, or you're selfish and impatient, or you're too lazy to try to make it work properly -- and those latter two reasons mean you shouldn't be permitted to have kids, you disgusting, reprehensible, utter failure of a woman.
I wrote a comment above about my own experience with my wife dealing with this. Indeed, we were always careful about who we told we were supplementing with formula, because we had a number of bad encounters with other militant breastfeeders. Unless you've had a baby recently and lived in an "enlightened community" where breastfeeding is the norm, you probably have no idea what kind of stress this puts on new mothers, and how much shame they are made to feel when they can't live up to the standard.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:03AM
Goat milk (or rarely, cow's milk) was also used as a substitute. And just because there weren't rubber nipples doesn't mean there weren't methods of getting milk into a baby's mouth.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:18PM
It is possible to breast feed wrong, at first, with your first child. If you don't have a knowledgeable woman there to help you, it can be rough going. And having breast-fed a child before does not necessarily make a woman knowledgeable, because a great many women have little recollection of the early weeks, afterward (possibly as an effect of oxytocin flooding their system). A formal or informal lactation consultant can be quite helpful to get past initial difficulties in getting the kid to latch on. Once those hurdles are overcome the same oxytocin seems to render the breastfeeding experience generally pleasant; pumping breast milk for feeding when the mother has to go to work is the chore.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:45PM
udder failure of a woman.
FTFY (sorry, couldn't help myself, which applies to breastfeeding on multiple levels.)