From St. John Paul II:
“Greater consideration should be given to the social role of mothers, and support should be given to programs which aim at decreasing maternal mortality, providing prenatal and perinatal care, meeting the nutritional needs of pregnant women and nursing mothers, and helping mothers themselves to provide preventive health care for their infants. In this regard attention should be given to the positive benefits of breastfeeding for nourishment and disease prevention in infants as well as for maternal bonding and birth spacing.” [John Paul II, Address to Dr. Nafis Sadk, Secretary General of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, March 18, 1994, n. 8. Emphasis added.]
From Alfonso Cardinal López Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family:
“For many years the value of breastfeeding has been recognized especially in terms of the close bond it establishes between a mother and her child and the health benefits of a natural form of nourishing infants. It is therefore heartening to see a revived interest in this natural form of nurturing. However, there is another dimension of breastfeeding that is not as widely known, that is, choosing breastfeeding as a natural means for spacing births.
Used in this way, breastfeeding has been found to be of particular value, not only in various traditional cultures, where such an approach has been known for centuries, but in the wider world. As one of the natural ways for regulating fertility, breastfeeding thus takes its place among various methods that constitute the ‘authentic alternative’ to contraception, and so it remains a subject for research and study.” (Foreword, Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing: The Ecology of Natural Mothering, Classic Edition, 2008. Emphasis added.)
Sheila Kippley
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding: The Frequency Factor