Breastfeeding Empowers Women—Yes It Does!
By Daven Lee
When a mother and baby breastfeeds, nobody makes any money. Cans of formula, which earn their companies $1 for every $.16 cents spent, grow dusty sitting on the shelves. By virtue of having breasts, a mother can produce all the food a baby needs for at least 6 months, while protecting herself from breast cancer and protecting her baby from asthma, diabetes, allergies, SIDS, lymphoma—in fact, she’s basically sharing her mature immune system with her baby.
And thanks to this, her doctor won’t have to prescribe those antibiotics for ear infections ($50+ per episode), and her HMO won’t have to pay the extra $331-$475 per year that they usually fork over for formula-fed babies. While her breastmilk is free, it’s worth about $3.20/oz, or about $32,000 year, as a mother who couldn’t breastfeed, but wanted to feed her baby breastmilk from a milk bank for a year, would have to pay at least that much in cost alone.
As they nurse quietly together, they are also taking care of our environment: they’re rescuing a little bit of the thousands of acres of land used for growing heavily pestisized soybeans, or for grazing dairy cows. Factories didn’t produce quite as much formula on their behalf, and maybe one less delivery truck contributed to traffic or ozone depletion while delivering the formula to market. They saved us all a little landfill space, as usually 550 million formula cans, with 86,000 tons of metal and 800,000 pounds of paper packaging are added each year in the US. And while she and her baby nod off together, drunk on the love hormone oxytocin they produced while nursing, they are saving their share of energy: shaving off a little of the 110 billion BTUs of energy used each year in the US for processing, packaging and transporting formula.
While baby suckles, and Mama coos, they are saving taxpayers money. Besides saving substantial health care costs, she’s saving her local WIC Program (Women Infants and Children), which gives her coupons for food staples at the grocery store as well as for fresh produce at her Farmers Market, 55% of the cost spent on the formula feeding mothers.
As Mama gazes down at her nursing baby, marveling at her baby’s delicate eyelashes, glowing skin, fuzzy new baby-hair, she feels a sense of confidence in her mothering—she knows her baby as no one else does. Baby strokes Mama’s soft skin, feeling her warmth and listening to her heartbeat just as she did in the womb. She feels completely secure and safe. As she gets older, she will encounter the world as a safe nurturing place, too, and be able to form strong friendships, develop trusting relationships, and even do well at school (of course her higher IQ compared with her formula fed classmates will help too).
Wow, this mother can do all this just because she has breasts?? Yes! No wonder formula companies are so eager to give her free samples, magazines, and little insulated freezer bags with their name and logo on it for carrying her expressed milk! If they could make her believe that her breasts are nothing compared to their experimental food for babies, they could make lots and lots of money! And she would lose her power, handing it over to these corporations generation after generation. And the funny thing is, her doctors and healthcare providers, who should be looking out for her and her baby’s best health interests, like getting some of this money too. Formula companies pay for educational conferences, bankroll their research, even take them out to lunch and give them free pens! No wonder doctors want her to believe her breastmilk doesn’t have enough iron, or “vitamin D” in it, or that her breasts won’t produce enough milk, or that it will be too much trouble for her to just whip out her breast and satisfy her baby, rather than just go to the store, purchase formula (at $1000+ a year, not including bottles etc), sterilize bottles, and schlep it all around in her diaper bag. No wonder they’d rather spend research money on ever-changing formulas rather than exploring the mysterious miracle of breastmilk and breastfeeding. They too have money to gain from her not breastfeeding.
Bringing corporations to their knees, undermining health care providers’ conflicts of interest, saving the environment, keeping yourself and your baby healthy, reveling in the special bond between you and your baby, not to mention doing what mothers and babies have been doing since time began. . . that’s empowering!