Choosing how to feed your baby is a very important decision. 

It can have an effect on both your baby’s health and your own.  This page gives you information about some of the benefits of breastfeeding.  

Breast-milk contains many layers of protection for your baby's short-term and long-term health. It also protects your own health and well-being.

Along with its physical benefits, breastfeeding also offers emotional and psychological benefits.


We asked our mums why they chose to breastfeed:

• YOUR breastmilk is tailored  for YOUR baby,  and adapts to meet your baby's changing needs.
• ​The video above shows their answers
  

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Breastfeeding - A few outcomes for your baby and you:

​FOR BABY: 
Protection against:-

• Ear infections
• Diarrhoea, gastro-enteritis and tummy upsets
• chest infections and wheezing
• Lower risk of diabetes
• Less risk of eczema/asthma and other allergies
• Better mental development
• Better mouth formation and straighter teeth

FOR MOTHER: 

• Lower risk of breast cancer
• Lower risk of ovarian cancer
• Faster return to pre-pregnancy figure
• Stronger bones in later life

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How we feed our babies should be a personal decision, but as women we are often not enabled, informed or respected enough when it comes to making these choices. This often leaves us sad and confused, fighting the ‘mummy wars’ instead of the structures which led us here in the first place.

To some extent, groups of women have always been oppressed by the way they feed their babies and class and ethnicity have exacerbated inequalities. In eighteenth century England the reproductive labour of lower class wet nurses was exploited as they put aside their own infants in order to serve the wealthy. Whilst in America, enforced wet nursing by slave owners provided a unique form of exploitation which still impacts breastfeeding rates amongst Black American women today. 

Shame has long been used as a punishment for women, to keep them in their place and to preserve patriarchal order. The mum who reaches for the bottle after being told that ‘breast is best’ feels the same sense of shame as the mum who secretly feeds her 2 year old because ‘he doesn’t need it now’. Pressure to breastfeed without adequate support or accurate advice and mixed messages about feeding for long enough but not ‘too long’, with no support for weaning, leads to tensions between formula feeders and breast feeders and detracts from the real issue of the structures that bind us. 

Infant feeding occurs in the context of a myriad of gender inequalities which include lack of support, the loss of traditional knowledge passed on from woman to woman over centuries, the sexualization of breasts, public aversion to breastfeeding, fewer women in public spaces, and the medicalisation of female bodies. 

​These issues are heightened at the intersection of multiple areas of discrimination such as ethnicity or class and gender which is demonstrated by shorter breastfeeding duration.  It is time for women recognise that however they feed their babies, these structures affect them and their right to choose. To break the bias, we need to fight against a culture of shame and instead fight for support, respect and information for our bodies and our choices. 

Dr Lyndsay Poore 
with thanks to Aayesha Bhattay. ​

Read more of The Chronicles of Breastfeeding here. Get support and help with breastfeeding here.