The custom of not nursing their babies is growing among women. Many babies are not nursed from the start. Others are nursed but a few weeks, or at most three or four months. There is a common superstition among women, fostered by the medical profession, that it is bad for both the mother and the child for it to be nursed longer than a few months. There are women who refuse to nurse their children for fear it will ruin their figures. Most of them have no figures to ruin. Others refuse to nurse their children for the reason that it hampers their social activities, prevents their participation in bridge, or their attendance at the theatre. Many of the "emancipated" ones, that is, those who have become wage slaves and are being killed in the factories, do not nurse their babies because this would interfere with their wage slavery.

Thousands of women protest that they want to nurse their babies but jump at every slight pretext for not doing so. Their readiness and willingness to discontinue nursing their babies upon the flimsiest excuses reveals that their protests are lies. Failure to breast-feed is, in most cases, deliberate end in many other cases the subconscious desire not to nurse prevents the secretion of adequate milk. Much "inability" to nurse the baby is due to carelessness, neglect or ignorance.

The delactation of mothers is due to a variety of causes, some of them deliberately employed by the mothers, themselves; some employed, either deliberately or unwittingly, by physicians. Their function-depressing treatments and their wholly inadequate dietetic prescriptions prevent the production of an adequate supply of milk.

Physical degeneration and defective functioning account for but an insignificant number of those women who bottle-feed their babies instead of supplying them with superior food from their own breasts. Lactation can be established and maintained in almost every woman. If mothers care for and feed themselves properly and give adequate attention to the essential details, the milk glands of nearly all of them can be brought into the required degree of activity. If women fully realized the value of natural feeding they would soon find the capacity for breast-feeding to be practically universal among them.

Much "inability" to nurse the baby is sheer unwillingness to do so. Many mothers can find the greatest number of flimsy excuses for not nursing their children. These must be made to see the great importance of breast-feeding babies. They must be brought to a full realization of the great advantage of breast-feeding over all other methods of feeding babies.

Except for those "emancipated" women who prefer their club activities, the theatre, or to be exploited in factory, office and store, to caring for their children, breast-feeding is much more convenient and much less work than washing and sterilizing bottles and nipples, making up formulas and feeding baby with a bottle. Nature's plan is as simple as it is superior. Women were very foolish to permit the he-women, the physicians, dairymen and manufacturers of prepared baby-foods to induce them to abandon the natural method of infant feeding.

Unfortunately the medical profession does not fail to identify its own best interests with the perpetuation and aggravation of our present disabilities. In accordance with its own financial interests it has neglected (and discouraged in all others) any effort to restore natural conditions in order that functions may be normal, and has employed all of its ingenuity in the task of producing an ever-increasing array of artificial "aids" to function. Under the tutelage of this profession we watch a year after year increase in the number of mothers who have recourse to the bottle instead of the breast in feeding their infants. Babies are thus fed more and more upon inferior foods.

The first thing the physician does is to give the mother instructions for bottle-feeding her baby. She leaves the hospital with a can of powdered milk and a formula by which to feed her baby. No effort is made to induce or enable her to feed her child from the fountains of superior nutrition.

Assuring Ample Milk

There are only two ways of increasing the supply of milk-namely, an improved diet, and the complete emptying of the breasts at each nursing. Water drinking will not help. There are no drugs to be taken internally or applied locally and no patented foods that will stimulate milk production.

Emptying Breasts

The complete emptying of the breast at each nursing is the most effective means of increasing the production of milk. If the breasts are not emptied each time, the secretion of milk gradually decreases. Farmers and dairymen have known this fact, with relation to cows, for ages. Some women, like cows, give more milk than others, but aside from this, the amount of milk secreted depends very largely upon the demands of the baby--increasing when more is consumed and decreasing when less is taken.

Unfortunately what farmers and dairymen know about their cows, few physicians know about women and few husbands and mothers are aware that the same principle is as true in relation to milk production in women as in cows. A dairyman who knows enough to thoroughly empty the udders of his cows at each milking will sit by and watch his wife neglect this in nursing her baby and wonder why her glands "dry up."

I have tried to emphasize the necessity for the complete emptying of the breast each time the baby nurses. Too many mothers allow their baby to nurse one breast for a few minutes and then give it the other breast. Neither breast is ever fully emptied and they both rapidly dry up. The child should be given one breast at one feeding and the other breast at the next feeding. See that it completely empties each breast before giving it the other breast, if one breast does not supply enough milk for the feeding.

It is highly important that the breast be completely emptied at each nursing. It seems a little strange that every farmer and dairyman knows that failure to completely empty the udder of a milk cow at each milking will cause her milk production to steadily fall off, but we fail to recognize the same fact in woman. Milk secretion is largely in response to demand.

If the breasts are not thoroughly emptied at each nursing, the supply of milk will quickly diminish.

Emptying The Breasts At Each Nursing Will Increase The Quantity Of Milk More Certainly Than Anything Else.