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Good news girls, Michelle Obama wants to subsidize your boobs! Or at least the lactose producing parts of them. As part of her “Let’s Move” initiative, she wants to give you a tax break for breastfeeding your infant. Even better, she wants to force your employer to make sure you can!

Breast feeding for at least six months has been associated with enhanced immunity and other benefits for children -- but a prospective study from Australia suggests breast feeding may also yield academic benefits later in a child's life, at least for boys. The study, which followed almost 3,000 children from birth onward, found those who were predominantly breast fed for six months or longer had significantly higher scores on standardized tests of reading, math, and spelling at age 10 compared with kids breast fed for shorter periods, according to Wendy Oddy, PhD, of Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in...

Cup of Serenity would like to apologize to TraidMommies, and to all breastfeeding mothers for the incident in our store yesterday. We are in full support of the planned nurse-in and will also support a "Breastfeeding Friday," and breastfeeding at anytime. We hope to turn our mistake into a way to help mothers everywhe...

ORANGE – A challenge to a woman's right to breastfeed in a local store has prompted mothers to stage a "Nurse-In" on Saturday. Rose Homme said she was shopping in Cost Plus World Market in The Village at Orange on Aug. 20 and about to leave when her 10-month-old son, Oliver, began to get fussy. "As I began walking out, I started to feed him," Homme said. An employee approached her and asked that she cover up or feed Oliver in the bathroom or outside the store. "I told her that it's California state law that I can feed my...

Controversy in Saudi Arabia over Fatwa Permitting Breastfeeding of Adults By: Y. Admon* Introduction Sheikh 'Abd Al-Muhsin Al-'Obikan, an advisor at the Saudi Justice Ministry, recently issued a fatwa allowing the breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa is aimed at enabling an unrelated man and woman to be secluded in the same room, a situation which Islam considers forbidden gender mixing. The rationale behind the fatwa is that breastfeeding creates a bond of kinship between the man and woman, rendering the man her mahram,[1] thus making it acceptable for them to be together in seclusion. The fatwa created a stir...

The Islamic population in the Middle East has been caught up in a new war, but it is its own enemy in the fight over a "fatwa" that authorizes the breastfeeding of adult men. "The fatwa-issuing thugs give orders, pass judgment, and make decisions: love is forbidden; looking [at a man] is a sin; expressions of love are contemptible – [but] as for breastfeeding, that is permissible, permissible, permissible," wrote Nadine Al-Budair, a presenter for the U.S. Arabic-language television station Al-Hurra. The dispute has been monitored by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which has compiled a history of it...

A large part of human milk cannot be digested by babies and seems to have a purpose quite different from infant nutrition — that of influencing the composition of the bacteria in the infant’s gut. The details of this three-way relationship between mother, child and gut microbes are being worked out by three researchers at the University of California, Davis — Bruce German, Carlito Lebrilla and David Mills. They and colleagues have found that a particular strain of bacterium, a subspecies of Bifidobacterium longum, possesses a special suite of genes that enable it to thrive on the indigestible component of...

In honor of Tom Brady [stats]’s 33rd birthday today, we give you more bon mots from his bride, supermodel/supermommy Gisele Bundchen who doesn’t have, unlike her Patriots [team stats] QB/QT hubby, a Belichickian filter. This week’s dispatch from Planet Gi is that she proposes a “worldwide law” that new mothers “breastfeed their babies for six months.”

Several moms are planning a protest at an Orange County park after they say a park employee tried to stop them from nursing their infants in public. Two of the mothers say a lifeguard at Kelly Park at Rock Springs in Apopka blew a whistle and told them that they were exposing themselves and breaking the law as they nursed their infants last month. Shawna Mitchell and Celena Chavez said a manager at the park did not know whether it was legal for the women to breastfeed publicly. A mother can breastfeed her child anywhere the mother is authorized to...

New research published in the FASEB Journal suggests that Lactobacillus reuteri immediately affects nerves in the gut, explaining how probiotics workHere's another reason to breast feed your baby: Canadian researchers have discovered how a probiotic found in breastmilk reduces or eliminates painful cramping in the gut. In a new research report published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), these scientists use mice to show that a specific strain of Lactobacillus reuteri decreases the force of muscle contractions in the gut within minutes of exposure. This bacterium naturally occurs in the gut of many mammals and can be found in human...

Saudi scholar's fatwa wades into controversy Saudi scholar gets into trouble for saying that women could give their milk to men for maternal relations Manama: A Saudi scholar has waded into controversy after he said that women could give their milk to men to establish a degree of maternal relations and get around a strict religious ban on mixing between unrelated men and women. According to Shaikh Abdul Mohsin Al Abaican, a consultant at Saudi Arabia's royal court, a man who often entered a house and came in contact with the womenfolk there should be made symbolically related to the...

CHICAGO – The lives of nearly 900 babies would be saved each year, along with billions of dollars, if 90 percent of U.S. women fed their babies breast milk only for the first six months of life, a cost analysis says. Those startling results, published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics, are only an estimate. But several experts who reviewed the analysis said the methods and conclusions seem sound. "The health care system has got to be aware that breast-feeding makes a profound difference," said Dr. Ruth Lawrence, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics' breast-feeding section. The findings suggest...

The day after her son was born, Jennifer Spiegel was awakened about 4 a.m. in her Evanston Hospital room and told by a staffer, "Your baby wants you." A patient-care technician then wheeled a newborn in and handed him to Spiegel, who breast-fed him. But it wasn't her son, according to a lawsuit filed in Cook County Circuit Court. A surprised nurse walked in while Spiegel was breast-feeding the boy and realized the mix-up, the Spiegels told the Chicago Sun-Times.

LONDON -- A breast-feeding mother accidentally smothered her four-week old child aboard a United Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., to Kuwait, a British tabloid reported Tuesday. The Sun newspaper said that the mother, who it said was a 29-year-old Egyptian-born woman, fell asleep as she breast-fed on the jet and awoke to find that the child had been smothered. The paper said the plane was diverted to London's Heathrow in an attempt to save the baby's life. The paper cited an unnamed police source in its reporting. Scotland Yard confirmed that a United Airlines plane had been diverted to Heathrow...

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MDThere is more evidence that breastfeeding benefits moms as well as their babies.Breastfeeding was shown to significantly lower a woman's risk for developing metabolic syndrome in a study reported today by researchers with Kaiser Permanente.The longer the women in the study breastfed, the more protection they seemed to derive. Is Your Type 2 Diabetes Under Control? Get Your Health Score Insulin Resistance, Belly Fat Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors linked to both diabetes and heart disease, including elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance, and belly fat.The new study is one of the most rigorously...

A New Mexico woman kicked off an airplane at the Burlington International Airport three years ago for breast feeding her baby is suing Delta Air Lines. The Burlington Free Press says negotiations failed to reach a settlement between the Atlanta-based airline and Emily Gillette. On Wednesday Gillette filed suit in U.S. District Court in Burlington. Gillette was ordered off a Delta Connections plane by a flight attendant after twice refusing an order to cover up while she breast fed her baby prior to takeoff. Gillette's lawsuit says she felt "shame and embarrassed" after being ordered off the plane. Delta refused...

Yesterday, Emily Gillette filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Burlington, Vermont, setting the stage for a legal battle, according to the Burlington Free Press. Three years ago, Gillette, her husband, Brad, and their then 22-month-old daughter, River, were ordered to leave a plane at Vermont's Burlington International Airport. It was a New York-bound Delta Connections flight operated by Freedom Airlines. Gillette was nursing River when a flight attendant asked her to cover up. Gillette refused. The flight attendant asked again, offering a blanket. The then 27-year-old mother continued to refuse. The flight attendant "pointed to the exit...

FURIOUS debate has erupted in Sweden about a former beauty queen’s attack on the country’s drive for a genderless society, which she claims has turned men into “nappy-changing” sissies and women into frumps who “neglect their husbands’ needs”. Comments posted on the internet by Anna Anka, a former Miss Sweden living in California with her husband Paul Anka, the singer and songwriter, provoked howls of outrage from women. There were also cheers from men who agreed that the Scandinavian push for gender equality had gone too far with the recent emergence of males wishing to breastfeed their babies. Paul Anka...

When mom is away, most dads offer a crying newborn a bottle of milk, a pacifier, a pinkie finger. But a Swedish dad is embarking on an experiment that he hopes will allow him to soothe a baby with his own milk-filled breasts. Ragnar Bengtsson, a 26-year-old student at Stockholm University, is regularly breaking out a breast pump to induce lactation. Bengtsson is the father of a 2-year-old child, but he has no plans to nurse his toddler. Rather he wants to breast-feed future children and inspire other dads to offer their breasts as a way to bond with their...

Sculpture of Angelina Jolie Breastfeeding to Be Shown in Oklahoma Next Month Controversial celebrity sculptor Daniel Edwards has unveiled his latest work: a park-bench-sized statue of Angelina Jolie in the nude, double breastfeeding her twins. This artistic work of public indecency (she's not wearing pants!) is called "Landmark for Breastfeeding" and was inspired by Jolie's cover photograph on W magazine last year. Edwards decided that, in order to encourage more women to breastfeed and to raise global awareness of public nursing, he would depict one twin as African-American and the other as not, since that could totally happen in the...