The health advantages for infants are widely recognized, but perhaps the dangers of not breastfeeding are not so well recognized in this country. After all, American babies born into poverty frequently have access to medical care when they get sick, and most of them will not be given water that is unsafe to consume. It has been reported for some years that if all babies worldwide were exclusively breastfed (only mother’s milk) for the first six months of life, the lives of 1,500,000 babies would be saved each year. I suspect that most of those saved babies live among the poor in less developed countries.
As breastfeeding expert Dee Keith puts it, “Give a family a tin of formula and you feed an infant for a day. Give a mom tools and education and she can feed her child for 12 months or longer from her own body and protect his health for a lifetime.”
Breastfeeding not only provides the best nutrition that particular day but also provides another 20 health benefits for the baby and eight special health benefits to the nursing mother, some of which are still helping her 30 years later. Teaching a mother to do ecological breastfeeding is the best breastfeeding education because most of the benefits of breastfeeding are dose related, and the practice of ecological breastfeeding helps to ensure a long duration of breastfeeding.
As Dr. Ruth Lawrence has said so well:
Breastfeeding is the most precious gift a mother can give her infant.
If there is illness or infection, it may be a life-saving gift.
If there is poverty, it may be the only gift.
John F. Kippley
PS: This week the US Catholic bishops published the John Jay Report on Clerical Sexual Abuse. You may be interested in my husband’s commentary on the Report. Sheila