ABSTRACT
I was born in 1962 and breastfed for about three months; my only younger sibling, similarly nursed, is twenty-two months younger than me. Thus, I don't remember my mother nursing us at all, and I don't recall having been around nursing infants as a young child. After all, it was the sixties—I was lucky to be breastfed at all. Yet when I was pregnant with my first child, I never really made a choice about breastfeeding, unlike the other choices I felt I consciously made, such as maternity care (midwife in a hospital), childbirth education (Bradley method), or my desire for unmedicated childbirth. I just never thought twice about bottle feeding. No one that I knew started out feeding their infants that way, or if they did, I didn't know about it. This was the nineties, when nursing, after picking up in the 1970s and then dropping off again in the 1980s, began a resurgence. Still, most American women who do nurse only do so for half a year (or less); more than two-thirds of all mothers in the United States are not breastfeeding when their infants are six months old.
