Breastfeeding—So Easy Even a Doctor Can Support It

Abstract

Imagine, if you will, a Super Medicine. It's stable and palatable. It reduces and prevents multiple diseases. It reduces and prevents deaths. One dose treats two patients simultaneously. It can even be manufactured safely and legally at home. It requires no insurance coverage. It's free to anyone who needs it. You don't have to imagine that Super Medicine, because it already exists. Breastmilk is all that, and a whole lot more. Which begs the question: Why are so few people using it? The answer is as simple as it is disheartening: Because not enough doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers are supporting it. It's difficult to imagine those same people not supporting penicillin. Vitamin K. Or the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine. Breastfeeding can save tens of billions of dollars, reduce infections, reduce cancers, prevent deaths, and bring a whole host of other health benefits to both child and mother, yet doctors aren't supporting it.1 Many of them aren't even recommending it. For more than 250,000 years, humans flourished by doing what mammals do: Giving birth to live young and feeding them mother's milk. In the past century, however, we've seen the decimation, the almost wholesale elimination, of three generations of breastfeeders and breastfeeding supporters. In less than 100 years, thanks to the advent of mass-produced infant formula, a quarter million years of 100% breastfeeding rates were reduced to 21%.2 It used to take a village to raise a child. Now it takes a factory. It's true that breastfeeding rates have improved significantly in the past 20 years and that, in some areas of the country, they're even exceeding Healthy People 2010 goals for breastfeeding initiation rates of 75%.3 But, duration rates are still pathetically low almost everywhere in the United States. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusive breastfeeding through the first 6 months of a child's life, yet by 6 months after delivery, breastfeeding rates drop to about 13%.4 How did things get so backward? And how do we get them moving forward again?