A new study confirms what people like Slate's Hanna Rosin and Texas A&M professor Joan B. Wolf have been saying for years now: The benefits of breast-feeding have been overstated. The study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, is unique in the literature about breast-feeding because it looks at siblings who were fed differently during infancy. That means the study controls for a lot of things that have marred previous breast-feeding studies. As the study's lead author, Ohio State University assistant professor Cynthia Colen, said in a press release, “Many previous studies suffer from selection bias. They either do not or cannot statistically control for factors such as race, age, family income, mother's employment — things we know that can affect both breast-feeding and health outcomes.”




As more and more research comes out showing that the benefits of breast-feeding are modest at best, I'm starting to come around to the French feminist theorist Elisabeth Badinter's views, which I once thought were overly radical and sort of bananas. I'm all for women breast-feeding if that is what is right for their families, but as Badinter does, I am finding the cultural push for all women to breast-feed, no matter how difficult it is, to be more and more oppressive. Hopefully this study will give women who can't or don't want to breast-feed for whatever reason more ammunition to tell the breast-is-best purists to get lost.
