Les Jones

I find it incredibly convenient, since there is nothing to prepare or pack. It's always ready and available. I can feed with one arm and computer with the other when I'm at home. I have grocery shopped while nursing, browsed thru department stores while nursing and sat in a swimming pool while nursing. I don't feel tied down and I am much too busy to be bored.

I tried it with my second kid and absolutely hated it. My kids were all bottle fed and are all incredibly healthy, make good grades and are as bonded to me as any breastfed baby is to their mother. If I'd have continued it, I'd have made my babies nuts cause I would've been nuts.

Being a guy who had to deal with a wife that was viscously and
violently (in a verbal sense) attacked by the breast feeding nazis
(and yes, thats what these people are) I just don't buy any of this
nonsense.

If you want to breast feed fine. I don't buy that its better or
worse. My son has turned out fine - and he was on formula the whole
time. Everyone else who breast fed their kids ended up having to
supplement them, or the mother ran into problems. Whatever.

Formula was SOOOOO much easier. We made a batch, stuck it in the
fridge, and that was that. No warming. No raw nipples, No nutrient
problems.

The wife and I are both convinced, around here at least, that the only
reason all these women breast feed is cause 3 weeks after they give
birth their back to working 12 hour days and basically paying some
stranger at a day care facility to take care of them. I'm sorry, but
breastfeeding doesn't make up for it. How dare they yell at my wife
as she's buying formula - or send social workers after her (a nurse at
the hospital) for wanting to feed our son formula!

I'll take her being a stay at home mom any day over 100% of the
breastfeeding nazis here in DC.

No one should be rude to someone else because they choose not to breastfeed.

However, to claim that the mountain of peer-reviewed medical research demonstrating the risks of not breastfeeding is overblown in some way is akin to arguing that the world is flat.

The risks of not breastfeeding are epidemiological - population wide - in nature. They are not measured on a kid to kid basis.

It's sort of like immunizations. You might have or know a very healthy bottle-fed child or a sickly breastfed child, but this doesn't have any meaning in the greater context of the research. After all, as a baby, I rode around loose in a car in a haze of second hand smokle and I'm just fine, but this doesn't mean carseats aren't important or that second hand smoke isn't risky for babies.

And Les, I myself happened to love nursing, but I do know women who don't and do it anyway, like Melissa. That's just part of responsible parenting, as y'all have realized. I do lots of things every single day for my kids that aren't much fun for me. I do them because it's better for the kids.

Put aside the health benefits for a second...
I thought BFing gave everyone a needed rest, and liked it for that reason. Plus, my wife likes to read, so she would 3 books a week while BFing.
Not to mention, being a cheapskate myself,it was nice not to buy formula.

Katie,

Excuse me for being so blunt, but I work on a daily basis with epidemiologists and government regulators and environmentalists all throwing out the specter of so called "peer reviewed medical research" and as such I find the line between complete and utter B.S. and the average politically charged researched conclusion to be often times less than firm.

Prior to the rebirth of breast feeding in the last 10 years or so, upwards of 75+% of Americans over the last 50 or 60 years were reared on formula. Yet, we have the most productive, healthiest, longest living population in our history while most other populations world wide that still rely on breast feeding are anything but (of course, there is lots more at play there including - mostly - poverty levels, but if your citing unknown and unidentified B.S. then I can allude to it too).