A new study of 4,763 children from birth to the age of seven has concluded that breastfeeding continues to have positive effects, many of which are just being discovered.

“The researchers found that children who had been breast-fed had, on average, a systolic pressure reading 0.8 mm Hg lower than those who were bottle-fed.  Diastolic pressure was also lower - on average by 0.6mm Hg - for breast-fed babies.

The findings held even when other factors such as birth weight, and mother's socio-economic status were taken into consideration.

The researchers found that the longer a baby was breast-fed, the larger the effect on systolic blood pressure appeared to be. However, no such effect appeared to apply to diastolic blood pressure.

…Lead researcher Dr. Richard Martin said a 1% reduction in systolic blood pressure across the population would prevent 2,000 premature deaths a year in the UK.  He said: ‘Around 40% of all infants in the USA or UK are never breast-fed.

‘If breast-feeding rose from 60% to 90%, approximately 3,000 deaths a year may be prevented among 35 to 64-year-olds.’"

(Source:  "Breast milk 'does cut heart risk',” BBC News World Edition, 1 March 2004; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3523143.stm.) 

"Dr. Ian Campbell, Chair of the National Obesity Forum told BBC News Online: ‘We know there is a clear link between breast feeding and a reduced risk of obesity, but we are not sure why.’

He said the risk appears to be lowered further the longer a child is breast-fed.

‘There is an accumulative effect, the longer they are breast-fed the better it is.”

Dr. Campbell added that breast feeding also enhances immunity.

(Source:  "Breast milk helps reduce obesity,” BBC News World Edition, 2 May 2004; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3673149.stm.)

America’s pediatricians have in recent years succeeded in overcoming decades of resistance to the practice of breastfeeding.  However, despite all their efforts, these same pediatricians are seeing most young mothers end their breastfeeding far too quickly because of their commitment to out-of-home employment.  It is indeed precisely because of the brevity of breastfeeding for most employed mothers that medical demographer Jacqueline H. Wolf of Ohio University must give an unsettling conclusion to the history of infant-feeding practices in the United States she recently published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Wolf focuses her history of infant-feeding practices on the two crusades by the medical community to increase breastfeeding: the first occurring in the early 20th century when contaminated cows’ milk caused many infant deaths; the second beginning in the 1970’s and continuing to the present as researchers have established that breast feeding reduces the incidence of infant disease and fosters optimal physical and neurological development.

The first national campaign to encourage breastfeeding occurred in the early 1900’s as local public health officials fought to bring down a distressingly high infant mortality rate. Because unsanitary cows’ milk accounted for many infant deaths, medical authorities endorsed breastfeeding as a way to protect infant life. One poster of the time spelled out the need for breastfeeding in almost theological language: “To lessen baby deaths let us have more mother-fed babies. You can’t improve on God’s plan. For your baby’s sake — nurse it!”

Unfortunately, within a couple of decades widespread pasteurization of cows’ milk had dramatically weakened support for breast feeding. “The lay and medical communities, Wolf writes, “came to believe that pasteurization nullified the differences between human and cows’ milk.” Consequently, between 1930 and the early 1970’s, the practice of breastfeeding declined in the United States, until in 1971 less than one-fourth (24%) of all American mothers even initiated breastfeeding. 

But beginning in the 1970’s, public-health officials and physicians again joined forces to promote breastfeeding. Wolf explains the renewed effort to promote breastfeeding as largely a consequence of “contemporary research” clearly showing that “exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months and prolonged breastfeeding thereafter is key to maintaining children’s and women’s health.” Wolf notes in particular the research documenting the protective effect of prolonged breastfeeding in reducing the incidence of pneumonia, leukemia, meningitis, asthma, diarrhea, and other illnesses among infants and the incidence of breast cancer among mothers.  Because of such research, “today’s medical community recognizes what their predecessors knew a century ago — that the American propensity to shun human milk is a public health problem and should be exposed and managed as such.” 

But Wolf does not give all of the credit for the resurgent breastfeeding campaign to epidemiological researchers. It was, Wolf claims, “the feminist inspired women’s health reform movement [which initially] rekindle[d] interest in breastfeeding.” In identifying feminism as a force responsible for renewing interest in breastfeeding, however, Wolf leads her readers toward an unacknowledged irony.  For in pushing women into out-of-home employment, feminism has largely frustrated efforts to promote prolonged breastfeeding. For while medical and public-health authorities have now persuaded over two-thirds of all American mothers to start breastfeeding (69.5% of all new mothers initiated breastfeeding in 2001), these same authorities have found that maternal employment has utterly frustrated their efforts to get American mothers to breastfeed for at least one year (less than 5% of American mothers now breastfeed this long). Wolf soberly reports that “only 10% of full-time working mothers breastfeed their 6-month-olds compared with almost 3 times that number of stay-at-home mothers,” adding that “this association between maternal employment and decreased breastfeeding duration is evident across all ethnic, education, and age groups.” 

As a progressive modern academic herself, Wolf rails against the paucity of “employers accommodating lactating employees.” But for the sake of infants’ and mothers’ health, perhaps it is time to rethink the feminist ideology that has driven mothers out of the home.

(Source: Jacqueline H. Wolf, “Low Breastfeeding Rates and Public Health in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 93 [2003]: 2000-2009.)