Will Formula Feeding Harm My Baby?

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Every action has risks and benefits, costs and savings.  Tradeoffs are unavoidable, and ostensibly risk-reducing behavior is virtually always accompanied by costs or new risks.  Breastfeeding and bottle-feeding are no different.

Breastfeeding benefits the environment by reducing pollution and waste from the production, packaging, and transportation of infant formula.  It also decreases food expenditures for lower-income families. Yet breastfeeding also has costs, such as the labor value of women’s nursing and the potentially negative impact of breastfeeding on family dynamics, women’s career trajectories, and women’s emotional and physical health.  It is only “free” if these costs are not taken into account.  

Breast milk contains environmental contaminants.  Despite the fact that most lactating mothers have detectable and at times highly elevated levels of these environmental agents in their milk, breastfeeding advocates and even environmental activists have been reluctant to emphasize this concern for fear of discouraging women from breastfeeding.  Conventional risk assessment methods, based on adult body weights and food consumption data, do not consider the ways in which infants and children are uniquely susceptible to chemical exposures via mothers’ milk.  Breastfeeding advocates who point only to the hazards of formula, such as that it can be contaminated in production or improperly prepared, neglect the fact that breastfeeding, too, has risks.

Extensive research indicates that babies in homes where mothers are psychologically depressed or economically stressed are at risk for a variety of developmental and health disorders.  For women who find the demands of breastfeeding overwhelming or who cannot reconcile breastfeeding with employment, formula-feeding might well be not simply as good as breastfeeding but the less risky way to feed their babies.

Research demonstrates not only that most people fail to understand the inevitability of risk but that when strong emotions, such as fear, are involved, people tend to focus on worst-case scenarios, not probability. Telling pregnant women and mothers of newborns that not breastfeeding is risky, or that formula-feeding will harm their new babies, is both false and manipulative. It misrepresents the science, and it exploits the concerns and fears of women when they are likely to feel most vulnerable.

In the past, many doctors routinely and wrongly challenged women’s ability to feed their babies from the breast, and they encouraged bottle-feeding based on misinformation.  Those mistakes, however, cannot be rectified by misrepresenting the value of formula.