Breastfeeding -- First-World Fretting, Third-World Suffering

Last week news sources revealed the true differences between bottle-fed and breastfed children in the United States:  Zero. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

The breastfeeding advocates have been adamant for many years, scaring mothers with threats of children with lower IQs, allergies, ADD and on and on.

Now comes a careful study that tested bottle-fed and breast-fed siblings of the same mother and found results were the same in both cases.  The researchers seemed disappointed by their findings, but at least they were honest.

So can we stop having the discussion in America today?  Can that La Leche consultant who told a working friend of mine to nurse every 10 minutes just shut up?  Can women who can't nurse continually for two years finally be cut a little slack?

Good.  Thank you.

Because studies like these about the raising of first-world children distract us from the real problems that formula feeding has caused in the third world.

For poor women with limited access to health care, formula feeding has been a disaster.

Let me count the ways:

1. Infant formula is expensive.  Buying such formula stresses the budgets of poor families, limiting  resources for people who have very little in the first place.
2. Breast feeding causes women's post-birth bleeding to stop sooner.  This is helpful to poor  women who have less access than those in the U.S. to medical treatment.
3. Poor women who feed their babies formula are more likely to try to save money by diluting        bottled formula with tainted local water, leading to more sickness and deaths in their children.
4. Breastfeeding delays mothers' menses and, as a result, return to fertility.  It allows for more time  between the births of babies to families who have no access to, or money for, birth control.

For many years, infant formula was promoted as a healthier, safer way to feed babies in the third world. Nestle has earned special disdain for its efforts to market infant formula worldwide.  Unfortunately, the marketing was quite successful. And, if you consider point No. 4, above, you can see that infant formula well may have contributed to overpopulation in the world's poorest countries.

Now the tide has changed.  A Unicef report last year said that only 39 percent (only 39 percent!) of third-world families' babies under the age of six months now are being fed infant formula.

Quoting the medical journal Lancet on these families, Unicef said "Optimal breastfeeding of infants under two years of age has the ... greatest potential to prevent over 800,000 deaths in children under five in the developing world."

It added that "an exclusively breastfed child is 14 times less likely to die in the first six months of life."