Saturday, June 1, 2024

MENDELSOHN: Breast-feeding also stimulates the production of prolactin by the pituitary gland, which enhances maternal behavior

from Robert Mendelsohn's Male Practice: How Doctors Manipulate Women, 1981.

Rather than discouraging breast-feeding, conscientious doctors should be doing everything they can to promote it because of its enormous importance to both mother and child. It strengthens the bond between them in a way that no amount of holding and hugging will achieve. It stimulates hormones that reduce postpartum bleeding and discomfort and causes the uterus to contract more rapidly to its normal size. It gives the mother sensual pleasure. It helps protect her from cancer of the breast.

Breast-feeding also stimulates the production of prolactin by the pituitary gland, which enhances maternal behavior. It also has a tranquilizing effect (without drugs) that helps the mother adjust to the pressures of having a new baby in the home. The prolactin also suppresses production by the ovaries of the hormone that triggers ovulation, thus providing natural birth control for a much longer time.

The baby benefits because breast-feeding provides it with nourishment superior to that supplied by formula milk. It provides better bone maturation and intellectual development. It protects the child from asthma and other hereditary allergies. Because nursing babies are not locked into rigid feeding schedules they eat when they are hungry. This makes them less prone to the digestive upsets seen in babies who are allowed to cry until the clock says mother can shove a bottle in their mouths. There is even evidence that the resulting avoidance of emotional disturbances and the breast-fed baby's closer bond to its mother reduce the danger of hypertension later in life.

One of the most important benefits that the baby receives from mother's milk is protection from infectious diseases that the mother has fought off through her well-developed immune system. The bottle-fed baby is much more likely to suffer a nightmare of illnesses that include diarrhea, colic, gastrointestinal and respiratory infections, meningitis, asthma, hives, other allergies, pneumonia, eczema, obesity, arteriosclerosis, dermatitis, growth retardation, hypocalcemic tetany, neonatal hypothyroidism, necrotizing enterocolitis, and sudden infant death syndrome. Babies raised on canned formula milk may also be affected by ingesting too much lead.

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