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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) 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.