I have now calmed down to the point that I no longer want to douse the LLL with gasoline and set them on fire, merely hurl large rocks at them. In first-world countries and among middle class and up women, where there are no sanitation or water quality issues. what the baby eats should be entirely up to the parents.

Mom’s breast is likely to have things like perchlorate in it, so you still can’t make a definitive declaration that giving formula to a child is tantamount to feeding them poison.

Yes, I’m still annoyed that the La Leche fascists berated my friend until she cried because she couldn’t breast-feed. You know what? It’s not your fucking business what other women are doing. Do what’s best for you and your child and STFU about your horrible neighbor who’s permanently damaging her children by giving them formula.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/545523

Apparently, if you control for parental characteristics, there isn’t any IQ benefit.

I highly recommend the book The Nurture Assumption by Judith Harris. It’s not about breastfeeding per se, but its take-home message is that unless you actually abuse your kids, how they grow up won’t depend much on what you do.

That book is awesome.

Here is the latest in “It doesn’t matter what parents do” news:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/02/food_and_the_fa.html

Apparently, there is almost no parental environmental influence on kids BMIs.

This is a very difficult thing, feeding your baby in public. There were many places I did it where I would feel this frisson of fear that I would be kicked out of wherever I was. It wasn’t that I cared if anyone saw my breasts. That was not the issue for me. The issue was all the stories I heard about women being harassed or ejected from stores, restaurants, airplanes. Jon Stewart even ridiculed a woman for breastfeeding during some political meeting on CSPAN. This made me cry for hours (post-partum weepiness).

I breastfed primarily because it was free, convenient and my baby loved it. The fact that formula was supposed to be bad for babies did deter me from giving more formula than I did, but we did supplement. A comparison between formula fed and breastfed people I knew made it kind of clear my child would not become some super-being, free of all disease, by breastmilk.

Breastfeeding did not hamper egalitarianism. In a way, my marriage became inegalitarian when I was breastfeeding because my husband started to do the laundry then and years later, he’s still doing it. I got a hand-free thing to wear and pumped out a lot of breastmilk while I was also working. My husband did a lot of bottle feeding.

A strange side-effect of breastfeeding that I rarely hear people discuss is that, when you breastfeed, your body produces certain kinds of hormones that relax you and also make you sleep. So as a lifelong insomniac, I had this instant sleeping pill.

That said, I breastfed my two children, I enjoyed doing so and found it much easier than dealing with bottles, largely because I kept trying to sterilise bottles and bits and pieces, forgot I’d left them on the stove and was later alerted by the fragrant scent of burning plastic. My nipples never needed sterilising. On the other hand, most of my friends and relatives have used formula either from birth or had to turn to it because the breast feeding didn’t work out. My breast-fed elder son had atrocious eczema, my formula-fed nieces and nephews seem to have had many more ear and throat infections. I don’t know that their primary food source as babies made that much difference. What I do dislike is the idea that any family should be made to feel bad about the choices it makes based on its own situation and circumstances regarding breastfeeding. Because in the long run, I don’t think it matters that much. I have never heard of anyone having diabetes or heart conditions or cancer because of what they were fed as babies. And we have had sufficient generations of non-breast fed babies to know that it doesn’t matter.

What does enrage me is situations like Nestle in Africa/India trying to persuade poor mothers who can ill afford it to buy formula when their breast-milk is essentially free and they do not live in sufficiently sanitary conditions to keep the kit sterile, causing unnecessary illness in small babies. And then of course there was last year’s Chinese baby-milk scandal.

In a pre-invention-of-baby-formula society, they would have been breastfed by someone else, or they would have died soon after the mother.

Dan Simon worte:
Around here, for example, breastfeeding babies all have to get vitamin D supplements, because most adults are deficient. The drops apparently taste terrible, because babies hate them and tend to spit them out.

Wouldn’t it make much more sense for the mothers to take the supplements? That way, both people benefit from the same pills.

Also, I have an old friend who is a scientist, who tells me that they are always planning or considering putting something new in formula—more vitamin D, “beneficial bacteria” and so on. This makes you think that if there’s something wrong or inadequate about formula it has the potential to affect millions of infants because of the centralized source of the product. This friend (male) won’t buy anything made by Nestle because of their pushing formula in third world countries. He studies human perception in infants and he says that studies confirm the baby can perceive what the mother eats through breast milk (and in the womb), so that if all babies are drinking formula, they are getting a grayed-out standardized taste palate, made to please babies (like the sugar they put in Macdonalds hamburger), but at a cost to human culinary cultural diversity.

Her inclination being: this seems unfair! It puts a lot of burdens on women! It shouldn’t be true that this is better! And then, magically, it’s not better.

Is she 5?

Gender equality doesn’t mean both parties doing 50% of everything all the time – if one thing is 60/40, or another 45/55, or whatever – as long as you are conscious of the differences, and have made self-aware choices in respect of those difference, and it evens out to 50/50 overall, then I’d say that works out to something approximating equality to the extent allowed by the modern world. That’s the way it works with everything surely, not just the feeding of one’s child.

#72:
one fact that springs out is that industrial pork is apparently free of trichinosis

One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in — and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.

If the mother feels put-upon and resentful when she’s breast-feeding, she probably shouldn’t do it. Once you (plural) have committed to breast, there’s a huge element of childcare which the father is never going to be part of, and there’s no real way of making it up. With our kids – especially the first – I was the resentful one, sitting downstairs wondering if this was it for the evening; my wife saw feeding as something she ought to do, was happy to do and enjoyed doing (mostly – early mornings were tough).

Great point about the egalitarian-marriage-enhancing properties of bottle feeding. This brings up an interesting point about how many factors there are to consider in making this decision:

1) physical and emotional health of child
2) physical and emotional health of parents
3) cost in money
4) cost in time
5) social acceptance of our practices
6) distribution of above effects among mother and father

What’s fascinating is that parents have to weigh tradeoffs between all of these. I’m sure no one could actually state their family social welfare function about all this. Luckily we come equipped with portable fuzzy logic matrix algebra machines (or however our brains work) for making these decisions using these factors!