Breastfeeding: One last thing

I don't mean to go on and on about that breastfeeding article by Hanna Rosin, but I'd like to make the point that my friend Ceridwen made, the point that gets to the nub of why Rosin's argument that breastfeeding is the scourge of birth mothers of infants is wrong. Because no matter what, whether fed with the bottle or breast, pumped milk or formula, a baby has to be fed at regular intervals. Formula feeding isn't magically faster than nursing, and it doesn't leave a free third hand with which one could get "organic juice" for older kids (a concern of Rosin's). Granted, someone else can give a baby a bottle, and presumably someone was giving Rosin's older children bottles of breast milk while she was working. (But then Rosin had to deal with those breasts, and she didn't like that.) But one way or another you've got to give the baby food and a four month old won't hold a bottle obligningly. Breastfeeding doesn't keep mothers of new babies at home, babies do. Financial options do. Choices do.