A very good article on breastfeeding VS formula feeding...

The Breastfeeding Conspiracy
~Believe it or not, formula isn't poison.~
by Marjorie Ingall
December 11, 2006

When my daughter Josie was a few weeks old, I started going to a support group for new moms. Most of us looked like we hadn't slept since the Carter administration. Epic tales were sung of colicky infants, dread about returning to work, exhaustion so severe it caused hallucinations. (I personally remember watching the bathroom rug crawl across the floor like a flattened Muppet.) Many of us cried over our struggles with breastfeeding: Plugged milk ducts, engorgement, nipples so thrashed and bloody they looked like raw hamburger, babies who couldn't latch on and kept losing weight. But some group members, those who'd had no problems nursing, kept insisting that we simply needed to try harder. Call a different lactation consultant. Use nipple cream. Butch up. Didn't we want what was best for our babies?

Exclusive breastfeeding is tough, and the temptation to give up is strong. Formula companies pimp their products, tucking bottles into the going-home bags of brand-new moms as they're released from the hospital, sending coupons to their homes, sponsoring medical guides and filling parenting magazines with ads. But breastfeeding advocates push hard too. Think of last year's public health campaign that compared not-breastfeeding to riding a mechanical bull while pregnant. In my ultrasound doc's office, there was a big poster headlined "THE TOP 12 REASONS TO BREASTFEED." The reasons included "Your baby will be smarter" and "You will lose weight faster."

Well, look, there's little doubt that breast is best, if you can manage it. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding for a year. Breastfed babies have been shown to have less diarrhea and fewer colds and ear infections than formula-fed babies. Studies indicate that they're less likely to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or develop lymphoma later in life. (More on these studies later.) Breastfeeding is also free and super-portable, whereas formula can cost from $1,000 to $2,400 a year. Given the vitriol aimed at formula-feeding mothers, in online forums and on the street, one might suspect formula was pure poison.

But given the vitriol aimed at formula-feeding mothers, in online forums and on the street, one might suspect formula was pure poison. Jill Davidson, thirty-four, of Providence, RI, an educational consultant, was the mother of a newborn when she was invited to speak at a conference in Chicago. She was able to fly her mother from Connecticut to stay with her and care for the baby. Davidson pumped in her hotel room, then handed the baby off to her mother to feed. As her sixty-something mother sat in the hotel lobby feeding the baby, a woman passing by hissed, "Shame on you! You should be breastfeeding that baby!" That's been the tenor of the breastfeeding discussion in recent years: women (even menopausal ones!) who don't do it must be either ignorant or abusive.

But women formula-feed for many different reasons. Some have medical issues, like Ginny Falk, whose daughter had a cleft palate. Some are viscerally disgusted by nursing, like my friend Judith. Some have jobs that are incompatible with nursing or pumping, like Debra Siegel, thirty, a marketing executive in Los Angeles. She worked in "a warehouse full of men. I didn't have an office; I'd have had to pump in the bathroom. And I needed the job; my husband was unemployed at the time." For Debra, returning to work was hard enough. Adding the stress of breastfeeding felt impossible. "I felt suicidal having to leave my baby, but I had no choice," she says. "I was the sole support of my family. So I decided not to even try to breastfeed. I'd talked to a lot of people and knew it took a while to get into a groove, and since I had to go back to work, I didn't want to spend my entire maternity leave feeling panicked and miserable. But as I got closer to my due date, people got more and more aggressive telling me I was selfish."

Click here to see the whole article... http://www.babble.com/content/articles/features/dispatches/ingall/index.aspx