I am really old so here is a stupid question?
What happened to breast feeding? How did infants make it to childhood in 1776 without baby formula? I don’t get it. I thought you could breast feed kids right up until they star with solid baby food.
What gives? Is it just not cool to breastfeed anymore or did some nutcase quack say it causes breast cancer or what? I am pretty sure I didn’t receive a gulp of baby formula when I was an infant back in the 1950s. I am pretty sure it was breastfeeding straight until strained carrots and applesauce.
What happened to breast feeding? How did infants make it to childhood in 1776 without baby formula? I don’t get it. I thought you could breast feed kids right up until they star with solid baby food.
What gives? Is it just not cool to breastfeed anymore or did some nutcase quack say it causes breast cancer or what? I am pretty sure I didn’t receive a gulp of baby formula when I was an infant back in the 1950s. I am pretty sure it was breastfeeding straight until strained carrots and applesauce.
That's an easy answer. They had these women called wet nurses who never let their breast milk dry up and made themselves available to nurse babies when the mother could not or would not.
It certainly was breastfeeding for most but for a tiny proportion of unfortunates. Infant formula is a convenience for the vast majority, not a necessity.
What happened (aside from convenience reasons) is that a lot more females that used to die from various ailments that damage lactation systems now grow to adulthood and have children, but can’t lactate or lactate enough. (Same thing with the recent explosion of young people with allergies - they used to DIE from ‘unknown causes’ and now they don’t.) There are diseases that prevent lactation, and lots more. Remember too that a lot more babies that were allergic or need special supplements/formulations to survive that are not found in breast milk are being diagnosed early and surviving.
Additionally, boob jobs can kill the possibility of lactation.
The irony is that now it’s legal to breastfeed in more places and for the women that *can*, it’s more popular than ever.