Ask any attentive junior-high school student what he/she learned about mammals and included in the answer will be something about live births, nursing their young, and that humans are an example. Most women, particularly in America, have not been acting as mammals in the suckling of their young. Fortunately, scientists, doctors, and mothers are waking up to their disregard. Science is uncovering the truth that nature knew all along. If mothers are convinced that breast-feeding is best for their newborns, will they have the support and financial freedom to make it work? What happened to women that caused them to want to put an artificial nipple in their babies' mouths and milk from a cow in their babies' stomachs while their breasts are engorged with milk? History presents many conundrums about the circumstances that led to bottle-feeding. Some of these findings border on conspiracy. Women need to be enlightened so they can fight this apparent conspiracy and return to being successful mammals again.

Various historical factors set the stage for the decline in breastfeeding in the twentieth century, as noted by Gabrielle Palmer in The Politics of Breastfeeding. Before the Industrial Revolution, most people lived in rural settings where the family was a self-contained economic unit. "When people refer to the woman's place in the home, they forget that before the Industrial Revolution everyone's place was in the home" (Palmer 127). When there was a baby to be fed, mother stopped churning or spinning and nursed. During the Industrial Revolution, family roles changed because of urbanization and factories. James Lewis describes it this way: "As the workplace became separated from the home, so a private, domestic sphere was created by women divorced from the public world of work, office and citizenship" (qtd. in Palmer 151). In such isolation, women found it harder and harder to take care of the chores and the children, especially those needing to nurse.

The hospitals built for the wounded of World War I and II eventually needed new patients, so there was a push for women to go to the hospitals to give birth where a professional doctor could attend. Midwives who formerly taught women the ways of breastfeeding were outlawed, yet the doctors were not trained to oversee breast-feeding. Furthermore, the bustling hospital environment inhibited the privacy that successful breast-feeding sometimes demands. In frustration, doctors began looking for ways to feed their sick, infant patients when women failed to produce milk.

Since the dairy industry had become mechanized and refrigeration and pasteurization made cow's milk much safer to drink, manufacturers saw the opportunity to exploit the circumstances. They started experimenting with using whey as a base for artificial human milk. "When a manufacturer has a waste product, his first business instinct is to search for a way of marketing that product, and the development of baby milk has been a marketing success story..." (Palmer 3).

Perhaps if the findings that have been recently uncovered had been available to the medical community in the early 1900s, a different path would have been followed. The benefits of breast-feeding to the baby are unmistakable. The first milk the breast produces, colostrum, promotes gut maturation, digestion, and the passage of meconium, the first stool of a newborn. Research is showing that breast-milk may protect against diabetes mellitus, cancer, lymphoma, diarrhea, ear infections, allergies, eczema, and asthma. Human milk contains enzymes, hormones (Maher et al.), and "longer chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are present in breast-milk but not in formula milks [and] are vital for brain development" (Ratner xxviii). Scientists are now able to measure this brain development. "[A] series of studies shows everything from 'small but still detectable' increases in cognitive development to an eight-point IQ difference between breast-and bottle-fed babies" (Glick). The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Canadian Paediatric Society brought out two important findings at the International Year of the Child in 1979. One had to do with the ability of breast-milk cell's "capacity to manufacture its own antibodies." The other finding was the maternal-attachment phenomenon. This has to do with the intellectual, cognitive, and emotional advantages of babies who bond with their mothers by breast-feeding (Ratner xvii-xviii).

Benefits to the mother include birth control by delaying ovulation, plus "fewer urinary tract infections; a reduced risk of hip fractures and osteoporosis; and lower rates of breast cancer, cervical, and ovarian cancer" (Baumslag and Michels xxviii). Also, "Breast-feeding helps contract the uterus after childbirth, sheds the extra pounds of pregnancy, ...and helps the new mom feel relaxed and happy" (Baumslag and Michels 91) through the hormone oxytocin (Baumslag and Michels 98). The bodies of mother and baby work together to produce milk suited to the individual babies' needs. The consistency of mother's milk varies appropriately from month to month, day to day and even within a particular feeding (Le Leche 360).

Formula and the bottle, though improved over the years, are poor substitutes for the real thing. "[T]he newborn can absorb five times as much iron from human breast-milk as it can from cow's milk" (Baumslag and Michels 70). The casein protein in cow's milk is difficult to digest and too concentrated, so it must be diluted by half for infant formula. Then, sucrose is added to make up the calories lost. Heating the formula then destroys the enzymes, mineral transport, and protective properties (Le Leche 360).

Despite breast-feeding's advantages, The "Baby-Boom" generation grew up equating babies with bottles and formula. The baby milk industry is now big business, generating $22 million per day in revenues. "The U.S. government provides free formula to 37% of all infants born in this country, using over $500 million in tax dollars each year to fund the 'gifts'" (Baumslag and Michels xxviii). Companies compete with bids of millions of dollars to earn the "right" to have hospital staff give out samples of their product in discharge packs. Hospitals even receive free architectural services from these companies. "Confronting the US Infant Formula Giants" in the Corporate Examiner gives an example of this: "The US-based company Abbott-Ross provided free advice to hospitals for planning and layout: 'The purpose here is to impose a design that literally builds bottle-feeding into the facility by physically separating mother and infant to make bottle-feeding more convenient than breast-feeding for the hospital staff....'" (qtd. in Palmer 8).

Even though doctors are no longer ignorant of the miracle of breast-feeding, they often succumb to the temptation to take a bribe from these formula-making pharmaceutical companies. "[T]he American Association of Pediatrics [has] benefited handsomely from forging cozy relationships with formula companies" (Baumslag and Michels xxvii). Large donations, of course, are given to medical colleges and the American Medical Association. "[A] 1991 study published in Pediatrics found that the pharmaceutical industry spends $6,000-$8,000 in promotion per doctor each year" [Baumslag and Michels' emphasis] (172). Formula companies sponsor much of the research into breast-milk to imitate it, not to promote it.

Apparently, corporate executives choose money over conscience. It would be difficult to take a stand for what is right for fear of losing position and high salaries. "As reported in The Washington Post, the chief executive of Bristol Myers (makers of Enfamil) earns a whopping annual salary of $12,788,000. The chief executive of Abbott Laboratories (makers of Similac) takes home much less [!]--only $4,213,000 a year" (Baumslag and Michels 171).

The profits of formula have not all come from the US and Europe. As the baby milk companies became hungrier for profit, they saw the whole world there for the taking. The weak, developing countries became key targets for spreading the pseudo-gospel of bottle-feeding. Even as the infant mortality rate was rising in the US and Europe because of the abandonment of breast-feeding, deceptive methods were being used to "hook" these poor, misinformed mothers to abandon their babies' only hope of survival. The formula companies targeted the growing urban areas of poor countries with this message: "Urban women could be modern." Naturally, everyone wanted to be modern. By that time television, billboards, neon signs, and radio were powerful mediums to convince all of the "need" for formula. Doctors there were given free samples to give out and were rewarded by "lavish gifts of equipment and research grants. In the early 1960s, the United Nations International Children's Education Fund (UNICEF) was distributing almost two million pounds of milk annually for malnourished infants" (Baumslag and Michels 148). The problem was "bottle-baby" disease-a "cycle of diarrhea, dehydration, and malnutrition resulting from unsafe, unhygienic, diluting feeding methods...where previously the only real breast-feeding problem had been the death of a mother (even in these cases, a relative would breast-feed the orphaned infant)" (Baumslag and Michels 150).

Another market tactic was the "milk nurse." The formula industry paid a salesperson dressed as a nurse to go to homes and hospitals to tout her wares. In Nigeria, 87% of the mothers studied believed that the hospital was advising them and bought formula (Baumslag and Michels 150). Sadly, many women would go without necessities for their families to buy this formula. "It has been estimated that if third-world countries would fully resume breast-feeding, ten million babies would be saved from diarrheal disease and malnutrition each year" (Baumslag and Michels 70). The US has its own depressing statistics. "Federal health officials have estimated that in 1992, 8,168 deaths occurred as a direct result of the withholding of breast-milk" (Baumslag and Michels xxv).

This has become a global problem, and the US government has actually held up the move for reform because of strong lobbying by the baby milk industry. The Reagan Administration feared that it would hurt the industry's $2 billion market (since tripled), that it would open the way for action in other areas such as prescription drugs, and that it would possibly even violate the Constitution (Baumslag and Michels 162, 163). In 1994, after thirteen years, the Clinton Administration finally joined with other member nations of the World Health Organization and voted to approve the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, a recommended course of action for governments and industry (Baumslag and Michels 169). The fight is far from over, though.

The media depiction of breast-feeding has left a "bad taste" in the mouths of "civilized" people by showing indiscreet poses of women breast-feeding with flies buzzing around them, while families sit on the ground in abject poverty. We hardly, if ever, see a white, well-dressed woman tenderly mothering her baby at the breast.

So, what can be done against such powerful entities as the media, the baby milk industry, the American Medical Association, the legal system, and the United States government who appear to band together to conspire against women and their babies? Some people write letters or boycott; some, like those of the home-school and home-birth movements, try to recapture the protection of the home; some fight in the courts. Maybe the best course of action is to educate each woman about breast-feeding, and that education must include a hard look at how breast-feeding is made to fail.

The popular philosophy of feeding schedules causes diminished milk supplies that rely on frequent demand. The hospital practice of whisking the baby away after delivery interrupts the establishment of the milk supply. Hospitals and misinformed mothers tend to give supplemental feedings of sugar water or formula, which gives false signals to the breast and confuses the baby's sucking action. The lack of privacy experienced in the hospital environment inhibits oxytocin, the hormone that causes the let-down reflex. The formula promotions that surround the mother in the hospital send the message that she will fail. The practice of scrubbing the mother's nipples to toughen and cleanse them causes soreness and discouragement. Poor nursing technique and position can cause problems. Health workers' general lack of confidence in breast-feeding translates failure to the mother. Social pressures from husbands, friends, and relatives, who see breasts as sex and beauty objects rather than objects of sustenance, communicate a sense of guilt to the mother as if she is being lewd when she breast-feeds. An extreme example of this happened in 1991 in Syracuse, New York. "A mother had her child taken from her and placed in foster care because it was assumed that her nursing a two year old was somehow tied up with sexual abuse. While all the abuse charges were finally dismissed, a judge found the mother guilty of neglect-for failing to wean her daughter sooner" (Baumslag and Michels 36). Mothers who have failed in breast-feeding sometimes try to protect their daughters from failure by discouraging their attempts. Women learn to breast-feed by observing and talking to women who breast-feed, so when there are no role-models, women are afraid to try. Women who work outside of the home may be anxious about returning to work in a matter of weeks, so they see breast-feeding as futile. The few brave souls who try to incorporate breast-feeding in their work day may end up fighting in court for their rights. In general, "[t]he United State lags behind the growing number of countries that have national policies supporting the presence of breast-feeding women in the workplace" (Mason, Ingersoll 171).

In this country, women are encouraged to be liberated. "The liberation women need is the ability to breast-feed free of social, medical, and employer constraints. Instead, they have been presented with the notion that liberation comes with being able to abandon breast-feeding without guilt" (Baumslag and Michels xxx). The mind-set of women and men needs to change in order to work together to overcome the obstacles to breast-feeding. Maybe then women can be successful mammals again.
 

Baumslag, Naomi, MD, MPH, and Dia L. Michels. Milk, Money and Madness:

        The Culture and Politics of Breast-feeding.  Westport, CT:

        Bergin and Garvey, 1995.

Glick, Daniel. "Rooting for Intelligence." Newsweek Spring/Summer 1997: 32.

La Leche League International. The Womanly Art of Breast-feeding,

        4th ed. New York: Plume, 1987.

Maher, Lisa, et al. "Advising Parents on Feeding Healthy Babies."

        Parent Care 32 (1998): 58. INFOTRAC Academic ASAP.

Mason, Diane, and Diane Ingersoll. Breast-feeding and the Working Mother.

        New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Palmer, Gabrielle. The Politics of Breast-feeding. London: Pandora, 1988.


Ratner, Herbert, MD. Foreword. The Womanly art of Breast-feeding, 4th ed.

        By Le Leche League International. New York: Plume, 1987.