It is widely agreed that breastfeeding delivers significant health benefits for both the mother and her baby and is more cost - effective for mothers than
other methods of infant feeding.
During the first half of the twentieth century a number of cultural changes resulted in the replacement of human milk by artificial feeding as the
normal method of infant feeding.
The health professional who assumes the artificial nipple is harmless is looking at the world as if bottle feeding, not breastfeeding, were the normal
physiologic method of infant feeding.
UN agencies have developed counseling guidelines for health workers and policy makers that address the risks and benefits of available infant feeding methods and how to make the
chosen method of infant feeding as safe as possible.
Despite current scientific evidence that artificial feeding can be a harmful practice, acceptance of breastfeeding as the normal or «default»
method of infant feeding remains elusive in the industrialised world [10].
The health promotion literature in the UK presents breastfeeding as the
best method of infant feeding (Carter, 1995); as one participant describes:
The mass media do not promote a positive image of breast feeding, even though it is
the method of infant feeding associated with the most health benefits.
Breastfeeding satisfies an infant's nutritional and emotional needs better than any other method of infant feeding
Breastfeeding creates a tension between the sexual objectification of women's bodies for pleasure and their role as an organic and natural
method of infant feeding, and it is within this context that women, and men, make decisions about infant feeding.
Of the 19 women who participated in the study, all but one participant had made a decision concerning
the method of infant feeding prior to the first stage of interviewing; 12 had chosen to formula feed and seven had chosen to breastfeed.