Babies, Bras, and Bottles

My most recent assignment for my Markets class was to choose an article from a back issue of The Atlantic. I read through numerous different articles and found that most were about politics or the economy; none of which are really up my alley. I really wanted to do something that had to do with women's issues of some kind, and to be honest, there weren't very many options!

I finally settled on "The Case Against Breast-feeding" by Hanna Rosen. Hanna had recently given birth to her third child, and having breast-fed her first two children religiously, she was simply too tired and busy to breast-feed the third. So, she began to put out feelers to other mothers about bottle-feeding her child. She was met with dirty looks and was made to feel as though she was a bad mother, because only poor lazy mothers don't breast-feed.

Frustrated by this persecution, she went in search of research and studies regarding breast-feeding versus bottle-feeding. She found that almost unanimously, the studies showed that breast-feeding was better. But, she wondered, by what margin? The studies said that bottle-feeding your child would cause him or her to be sicker than other children. Hanna consulted doctors to find out what health risks were associated and found out that when they said "sicker" they meant that the baby might have one or two more cases of diarrhea than a breast-fed child. Other studies went as far as to say that breast-fed children did better in school, had better skin, had better smelling poops and were less likely to be obese. So, basically mothers today are made to believe that their babies will be uglier, fatter, dumber, smellier, and sicker if they made the choice to bottle-feed. The author felt overwhelmed by the pressure of doing the "popular" thing and the pressures of society when all she wanted to do was make a choice that was best for her and her baby.

If you want to check out the article, follow this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/case-against-breastfeeding