Breastfeeding Failure

Helen Roy writes that 75% of women in the US try to breastfeed, but give it up somewhere along the line. This is a little weird. All the other mammals breastfeed, and they do not “fail.” Today, at six months of age, only 13% of babies are exclusively breastfed.

My wife breastfed our son exclusively. He never tasted “baby formula.” He even refused, as an infant, real breast milk in a bottle. This was, not very long ago, the norm. “Baby formula” only became common in the 1960s, although there were various home recipes before then. It coincides, not surprisingly, with the spread of working mothers.

Breastfeeding is very time consuming. A mother of an infant, especially in the first few months, may have to breastfeed about every two hours, including through the night. This, in itself, is no big deal. It is what human mothers have done for millions of years. Commonly, this and other basic babycare tasks can become so demanding that basic housekeeping and cooking may be neglected. Often, family and friends may help out around the house for the first few months.

Obviously, breastfeeding and working outside the home do not go together very well — or, even working in the home, or working from home. The solution, that we promote around here, is: Don’t work. Be a stay-at-home Mom. This might mean giving up some material comforts. Women in the prehistoric past lived in tiny huts made of twigs and leaves, but they stayed home and breastfed their infants.

Are you really going to find some other, better solution? In the last fifty years of working mothers, nobody has. We have the Feminist types begging for state-funded daycare, mandatory postnatal work leave, and all the other things to make a dysfunctional system less dysfunctional. But, even if they got all their wishes, these women would soon find out that abandoning their children to be raised by the State, and depending ever more on The Corporation to be their provider, instead of a husband, has dire consequences. Why bother to have children at all. Women themselves are coming to the same conclusion, which is one reason we see fertility rates plummet far below replacement levels wherever mothers work full time.

Be a Barren Whore if you like. But, if you have children, get married first, and be a stay-at-home Mom. And, breastfeed. If you are already a stay-at-home Mom, why not?