In the November/December 1971 issue of Nutrition Today, Dr. Otto Schaefer stated that the Eskimos prolonged lactation provided a natural spacing of three years and kept the Eskimo family small (“When the Eskimo Comes to Town”). “It is this prolonged lactation period more than high infant mortality that kept the traditional Eskimos family small.” The traditional Eskimo family size averaged 3 to 4 children. This natural spacing was lost once the Eskimos were exposed to urbanization and the trading posts. The closer they lived to the trading posts, the closer they had their babies. As a result there was a “50 percent jump in the Eskimo birthrate in the Northwest Territories alone, and the increase from less than 40 births per 1000 in the mid-1950s to 64 per 1000 ten years later.” This increase birth rate was due to the increased use of the bottle and shortened lactation.
In a paper presented at the Circumpolar Health Symposium in Oulu, Finland in June 1971, Dr. Schaefer spoke of the traditional lactation effect on postpartum infertility. The women aged 30-50 years who had reared children in camp life with prolonged lactation conceived 20-30 months postpartum. The younger women aged 17-29 who were urbanized and used bottles for their babies conceived “2 to 4 months after the birth of the previous child.” What a difference!
The story of Dr. Schaefer’s life was written by Dr. Gerald W. Hankins and was titled Sunrise Over Pangnirtung. Dr. Hankins mentioned in that book that Dr. Schaefer believed that “breast feeding had a greater influence on the life and health of infants than any other single factor.” Schaefer also wanted women to give up bottle feeding so they would receive a desirable spacing of children with breastfeeding.
One interesting note was that Dr. Schaefer did not hear of any complaints from mothers who nursed traditionally. Not as with the bottlefeeders. However, when he attended the women’s conference in Pangnirtung in 1981, Dr. Schaefer observed according to Dr. Hawkins that: “Many complained about having ‘too many kids around,’ one of the consequences of giving up breast feeding. Others found that they had little to keep them busy and that their children weren’t respectful or obedient any more.”
Dr. Schaefer spent 32 years of his medical career in the barren lands of northern Canada, and his research was written up in over 100 papers and publications. He constantly took notes when providing medical care. I was pleased to meet his daughter at a breastfeeding conference in California. (She was nursing a three-year old.)
Tomorrow: early solids, bottles and pacifiers
Sheila Kippley
The Seven Standards of Ecological Breastfeeding