Breast is not "best." It’s standard.
By Lucky Tomaszek
The first week in August is World Breastfeeding Week, and several international organizations invest lots of time and money into raising the world community’s understanding of the importance of breastfeeding for mothers and babies all over the globe.
The decision of how to feed your baby is a deeply personal one, and often starts heated debates. It’s one of the first decisions you will make for your baby and it’s one that most expectant moms spend quite a bit of time reading and thinking about. I want to be clear that it’s not ever my intention to hurt the feelings of any other mother out there, or to anger anyone who has made different choices. I hold the firm belief in my heart that each mother has made the best decision possible for her child with the information she had at the time and based on what she feels will work best for her and her family.
Not “best,” standard.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Breast isn’t best, it’s standard.
We were designed as a species to feed our young milk from our breasts. It’s how we got our name, Mammal, from the mammary glands. There are other unique things about Mammals we could have been named for. For instance, we are the only species with hair, and the only species that gives birth to live babies. But it’s our mammaries for which we’re famous. That’s because universally, mammals nourish their babies with breast milk.
When you say “breast is best” or “breast milk is a perfect food,” it leaves a lot of room for other things to be good or even great, because perfection is an unobtainable goal. Everyone knows the saying, ‘nobody’s perfect.’ But when we are honest and we say that breast milk is the standard food, it becomes obvious that artificial baby milk is substandard.
It’s perfectly logical.
The same logic follows for the other benefits of breastfeeding. We are often told that breastfed babies are healthier than their formula fed counterparts. This is another statement that should be turned around. If breastfeeding is the standard, then the babies who are breastfed are not healthier, but simply the standard of health. And so it follows that their formula-fed counterparts (like me) are not as healthy. Think of other, similar statements we hear all the time. Breastfed babies are smarter, talk earlier, need less orthodontic work and have fewer allergies. The list goes on. The logic is easy to follow.
Obviously, breastfeeding is not just the standard for babies, but for their mothers as well. We have seen a marked increase in female cancers, heart disease in women, and osteoporosis since the beginning of the decline of breastfeeding rates in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Breastfeeding not only protects the baby getting the milk, but the mother providing it. It’s been observed by medical doctors for literally hundreds of years that women who nurse their babies have fewer life threatening illnesses, and in the last two years numerous studies have supported this common sense observation.
In the US, the popularity of baby formula, like packaged food, has grown dramatically over the last 75 years, as Americans have become addicted to convenience, too trusting of science and almost suspicious of anything natural.
Our bottle feeding preference is obvious in our media and marketing. It is very difficult to find a baby book, a new doll, or even a piece of baby themed wrapping paper that does not include a bottle.
I suppose it would be a little inappropriate to wrap up new baby’s new layette in paper covered with pictures of milky breasts, but to my mind, bottles are equally out of place as decorative elements. The phenomenon trivializes an important fact: that breastfeeding helps form the basis of life long health for babies and their moms.
