Breastfeeding In The News

Market Watch has a great article about the obstacles mom face while pumping at work, and why a lot of women give it up. As someone who pumped through college and at work, I have faced many of the obstacles the article describes. It's a shame that most businesses don't realize the value for them of having their employees breastfeed their children (children get sick less and therefore employee has to miss less days). From the article:

Despite the entreaties to breastfeed, few employers go out of their way to help women continue to do so. One in four companies offered an on-site mother's room last year, and 6% had lactation support services, according to the Society for
Human Resource Management. Fifteen percent had paid maternity leave beyond what short-term disability covers, and only 6% of companies had on-site child care.

Read the full article here.

Great Britain adopts the World Health Organization growth charts for babies, which are based on the rate of growth of breastfed babies. From the article:

Cole added: “The way breastfed babies grow will now become the norm. With the previous charts a breastfed baby could be growing perfectly normally but would appear to the health visitor not to be growing as fast as the charts recommended, so there might have been pressure to wean early [on to solid foods or formula milk].
“Thin babies will [now] not appear to be so thin and fat babies will appear to be more fat. The fat babies are likely to be formula fed, growing very fast and developing problems with obesity.”

Read the full article here.

Finally, another great article on why so many women stop breastfeeding when their maternity leave ends. From the article:

According to a joint study by the National Women’s Health Resource Center and Medela breast pump company, 32% of mothers in the U.S. stop breastfeeding 7 weeks after returning to work. If 4.1 million babies are born in the U.S.
annually, and 25% of mothers return to work post-birth, (both stats from the
U.S. Census Bureau), some 328,000 babies per year are being switched to formula
at 5 months even though their mothers are capable of breastfeeding.

Read the full article here.

Breastfeeding In The News