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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, @05:41PM
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.)