Leonardo da Vinci
5. Life can be easier when you breastfeed – Breastfeeding may take a little more effort than formula feeding at first. But it can make life easier once you and your baby settle into a good routine. Plus, when you breastfeed, there are no bottles and nipples to sterilize. You do not have to buy, measure, and mix formula. And there are no bottles to warm in the middle of the night! You can satisfy your baby’s hunger right away when breastfeeding.
Karen McKendry Minton
6. Breastfeeding can save money – Formula and feeding supplies can cost well over $1,500 each year, depending on how much your baby eats. Breastfed babies are also sick less often, which can lower health care costs.
Orazio Gentileschi
7. Breastfeeding can feel great – Physical contact is important to newborns. It can help them feel more secure, warm, and comforted. Mothers can benefit from this closeness, as well. Breastfeeding requires a mother to take some quiet relaxed time to bond. The skin-to-skin contact can boost the mother’s oxytocin (OKS-ee-TOH-suhn) levels. Oxytocin is a hormone that helps milk flow and can calm the mother.
Mary Cassatt
8. Breastfeeding can be good for the mother’s health, too – Breastfeeding is linked to a lower risk of these health problems in women:
Type 2 diabetes
Breast cancer
Ovarian cancer
Postpartum depression
Experts are still looking at the effects of breastfeeding on osteoporosis and weight loss after birth. Many studies have reported greater weight loss for breastfeeding mothers than for those who don’t. But more research is needed to understand if a strong link exists.
(
womenshealth.gov)
Photo by me of my daughter and granddaughter
**Quotes and articles about the Time mag cover and breastfeeding**
"The battlefield keeps shifting. One week, women are attacked for earning more than men, the next week for poverty. They’re assaulted for having too many children or too few, for physically clinging to them in “attachment parenting” or coldly hiring nannies, for breastfeeding too long or weaning too soon, for seeking public daycare or private, using birth control or forgetting to use it, for staying home full-time, marrying rich, marrying deadbeats, accepting welfare, aborting for Down Syndrome, not aborting, being Yummy Mummies, being “too posh to push,” the list goes on.
Watching anti-abortion protesters on Parliament Hill this week after the Harper government had beautifully shut them down during a Commons debate was more of the same. If you’re against abortion, don’t have one. If you don’t like other women breastfeeding, pump and donate. That’ll go over well."
Quoted from article by
Heather Mallick, Star Columnist
"Prudishness from our flesh-flashing culture is blatantly hypocritical. Grocery stores display racks of magazines with nearly-naked models. Our beach may as well be a nude one for all the skin shown. Out in public, I see scantily-clad adults, teens and kids everywhere. I'm expected to be tolerant of this. Well how about some tolerance for functional breast exposure? If nude is nature, then breastfeeding is the best example."
Quote from
Marilisa Kinney Sachteleben's commertary
“There’s no one way to parent,” she writes. “But we’re told in many insidious and just plain overt ways that we’ll never be good enough. It doesn’t make sense, and the result is that we have lost the ability to trust our own instinct.”
Taken from article by
Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer Christian Science Monitor
"Time Magazine Asks "Are You Mom Enough?" Every Mom Should Be Offended"
I am not the Babysitter - Jamie Lynn Grumet's blog
