Time Magazine's Breastfeeding Cover Controversy

Most of what I'm finding is "it's pretty individual" and "there isn't a lot of hard science on this." But frequency of nursing has something to do with it -- if you're nursing day and night (like with an infant) you're less likely to get pregnant than if you're doing the more occasional nursing that happens once a baby starts eating solid food.

Random example of the stuff I've been looking at (nothing I found in a quick search was really definitive):

http://www.lalecheleague.org/nb/nbmayjune04p114.html

(The longer list of "responses" more than the first response).

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2012/05/15/out_of_the_mouth_of_babes/


Happened to come across this article on primate, including human, breast feeding behaviour.

Suggests we in the west are "outliers" with our generally short breastfeeding time.

Yeah, there was a book by Toni Morrison in which a kid was sort of reviled and ridiculed his whole life because someone looked in a window and saw him at his mom's breast when he was an older child.

I breastfed my son until he was 18 months old and then my husband sort of intervened and said, 'Look, he's walking and now he's talking - enough is enough' and that was fine because by that time it was only really once at night to help him get to sleep, and I had to admit that mainly at that point, it was for my benefit. I loved it. It's an amazing experience- being able to produce nourishment and emotional comfort for your child, and I did probably prolong it past the point that it was absolutely necessary for any added benefit to be gained by my son.

So although I adopted my daughter, I did try to breastfeed her, precisely to facilitate attachment as well as because I believe in the nutritional advantages of breastfeeding.
It'd been about two years since I'd last breastfed my son (my children are 3 years, 9 months apart) so my doctor gave me this electric breast pump a couple of months before we picked Olivia up - we had to wait for the court date to roll around so although we learned we were going to adopt her in July, we had to wait to actually go to court and bring her home til September, and she was 4 and a half months old at that point and had been bottle fed from birth to then.

And it was this really amazing set up: I was pumping for a couple of months and had started producing SOME breast milk - apparently my body produces alot of the hormone prolactin naturally, so lactating comes easily to me. Anyway, when we went to pick her up, they gave me this little pouch with a tube and you put formula into the pouch and the tube goes into the baby's mouth at the same time as the nipple so that when they suck, they get some food, even if it's not breast milk, so they won't get frustrated and give up.
Because a baby does have to work harder to extract milk from the breast than they do to extract it from a bottle, and breast milk tastes different from formula, so if you make all those changes at one time - it freaks them out.
In other words, the milk doesn't just flow out from a breast as it does from a bottle and taste just like formula.

Well, I tried it for two days, but my daughter was already used to the bottle and every time that breast came toward her she just screamed as if she was thinking, 'Oh, I just want to EAT - let me have my normal meal the way I'm used to it', and I said, 'Look - this is just scaring her, and on top of having just been handed over to this strange woman, now she's not even having the familiar comfort of being fed as she's used to being fed,' so although it was a worthwhile idea and I was hoping it'd work, I really did believe that if I persisted it would actually harm her ability to attach to me, so I just gave her what made her happy and comfortable - the bottle.
And she turned out great.

I don't care if people breastfeed their children as long as they and the child are comfortable with it, but I don't like this cover. It doesn't express at all what I think breastfeeding is about - it looks like two people posing as if to say, 'What the **** are you looking at? ' in defiance.
Well, why are they posing?'
I think it would have been much more effective if they'd at least acted as if they were doing what came naturally to them in their own individual relationship somewhat naturally.
Does the little kid REALLY look over his shoulder everytime to see who's watching?
Does the mother REALLY glare at the camera (or whoever she's confronting with this for whatever reason)?

No, I don't like the cover at all - although I do believe in breastfeeding.

In the picture the mother is looking at the camera - in real life she might be watchingTV and the kid has to look over his shoulder to see what is going on.

A friend of mine breastfed her children in the strangest way in my opinion.
She laid down on the bed and put her child so it could suck the breast without any form of body contact. The only plus is that breastmilk is helthierbut the comfort of a mother is missing.

My daughter only had formula, but now and then I fed her topless and she just in a diaper so she should have that body to body feeling which breastfed children get.