August was a good month for breastfeeding and natural family planning. During NFP Awareness Week (July 22-28), my wife, Sheila, blogged each day on ecological breastfeeding, the only form of breastfeeding associated with extended natural infertility. During World Breastfeeding Week (August 1-7), Sheila blogged daily on the many health benefits of breastfeeding. Then on August 10, Theresa Notare of the USCCB office for Natural Family Planning issued a press release on breastfeeding titled “Mother Nature’s Power Drink.” This release has the potential to do more for increasing the overall rate of breastfeeding in the United States than anything that Sheila and I can ever hope to accomplish.
The release, which is printed in full below, does not represent a policy statement on the part of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. Not yet. Its significance is that it is the first such publicity and advocacy given to breastfeeding by any office of the U.S. bishops. The late Bishop James T. McHugh, former head of the bishops’ Diocesan Develop Plan for Natural Family Planning, was definitely in favor of breastfeeding, and he made the introduction to the address of Pope John Paul II to the papal breastfeeding conference in May 1995. However, we are not aware that he ever made a public statement such as this. If serious breastfeeding advocacy would become an official USCCB policy, it could have widespread beneficial effects for the Church and for all those affected by its health-related activities. Sheila and I are grateful for this initiative by Theresa Notare, and we offer her our public thanks.
Next week I will comment more on this potential and what might have been if the Church at its everyday level had retained during the 1950s its former advocacy of breastfeeding. For the present, enjoy Theresa Notare’s press release below
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Life Issues Forum
Mother Nature’s Power Drink
By Theresa Notare
For Immediate Release – August 10, 2007
Recently a report on a tragedy in Botswana puzzled its medical community. Record numbers of babies died of common diarrhea, in a country where that had rarely happened. The cause? Over a decade of an aggressive anti-AIDS policy that discouraged breastfeeding among HIV infected mothers. Remarkably, in a follow-up study of the tragedy, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that breastfed babies did not die from the diarrhea outbreak.
Botswana had been a country where the majority of mothers commonly practiced breastfeeding. Once HIV/AIDS surfaced as a public health problem, however, government officials implemented a policy of discouraging breastfeeding and encouraging formula feeding of infants whose mothers were HIV infected. They thought they were protecting babies, but they put their children at greater risk of suffering other devastating illnesses. Why? As the Washington Post pointed out on July 23, 2007, the chances of an HIV infected mother passing the disease through breast milk is “about 1 percent per month of breastfeeding.” Breastfeeding research shows that the “nutrition and antibodies that breast milk provide are so crucial to young children” that their benefits should be carefully weighed against the risk of HIV transmission.
Breast milk is Mother Nature’s “power drink.” Research confirms its nutritional and immunological benefits. Breast milk reduces a baby’s risk of contracting over twenty illnesses, including allergies, asthma, bacterial meningitis, diarrhea, ear infections, inflammatory bowel disease, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, type 1 and type 2 diabetes. And a woman who breastfeeds reaps benefits for her body too. As breastfeeding advocate Sheila Kippley reports, “one study found that a mother reduced her own risk of getting type-2 diabetes by 15% for each year of nursing. If she nursed two babies, each for a year, she had a 30% risk reduction for this disease, and whatever reduction she received remained in effect for 15 years after the birth of her last baby!”
Breastfeeding also builds up the mother-child bond on an emotional and spiritual level. As Pope John Paul II said in a talk to members of the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1995, “this natural way of feeding can create a bond of love and security between mother and child, and enable the child to assert its presence as a person through the interaction with the mother.” So meaningful is the breastfeeding relationship, he added, that “the Psalms use the image of the infant at its mother’s breast as a picture of God’s care for man (cf. Ps 22:9).”
Despite its overwhelming benefits, breastfeeding continues to be little attempted by new mothers in the United States. This is a problem. With our concern for the welfare of the family, the Church can help. Catholic hospitals are in a particularly good position to advise and educate the new mother before and after she gives birth. Diocesan Natural Family Planning classes can take the time to cover basic breastfeeding information. Finally, friends and family also play a role in the new mother’s decision to breastfeed. Children should be given a solid start in life – a plentiful serving of nature’s power drink is a great beginning!
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Theresa Notare, MA is the Assistant Director of the Diocesan Development Program for Natural Family Planning, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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Next week: “What if” in the 1950s.
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, easy-to-read, free, downloadable e-book available at
www.NFPandmore.org