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Monday, December 19, 2005 12:00 AM

Baby, we were born to breast-feed?

A San Diego billboard grabs the attention of the blogosphere.

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  • Monday, December 19, 2005 06:08 AM

    Making women feel guilty?

    Actually, women cannot be "made" to feel guilty, despite what Traister claims.

    If a sign saying "Babies were born to breastfeed" leads a woman to feel guilty, it is because she has allowed herself to be influenced by the sign.

    In this society, women, men, boys, girls are bombarded with ads trying to convert them to someone else's point of view. If you don't develop a certain cynicism toward such ads, then if you are an adult, you are probably dysfunctional in this society.

    As to the fact of the matter, questioned in the headline over Traister's typical microtantrum as "Baby we were born to breastfeed?" (it's not my grammar), well, Yes! If you happen to believe in Darwinian evolution and know the first thing about it, then you know that babies were born to breastfeed.

    Fwiw. This doesn't mean that bottle-feeding isn't a perfectly viable alternative. But babies were born to experience the skin-to-skin contact that breastfeeding affords (cf. the book "The Continuum Concept" by Jean Liedloff). So if a baby is bottle-fed, they still need that extra dose of skin contact.

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