Melissa Bartick

Whoopi Goldberg and friends on The View threw a Molotov cocktail of ignorance into the middle of the Mommy Wars. This time it's about whether hospitals have the right to market formula to new moms with free samples. The women of The View give a unanimous, "Yes."...

The controversy over the Berjuan nursing doll underscores that Americans still have a long way to go to accept breastfeeding as normal. If little Maggie wants to play with her baby doll, she will want to feed it somehow, won't she? Traditionally, baby dolls come with little toy...

There's not a lot of love between right and left these days, but one thing politicians of every stripe agree about is breastfeeding, at least when it comes to their own families. Michelle Obama says she breastfed her daughters, bringing her younger one to work at eight months so she...

Since this month's publication of my paper "The Burden of Suboptimal Breastfeeding in the United States" in Pediatrics with Arnold Reinhold, I'm often asked by reporters what the US can do better to improve our breastfeeding rates. I've also gotten quite a few comments asking if this...

Women now comprise about half the US workforce, according to a major story in the December 30 issue of the Economist. In other words, half our workforce bears all our children. Anyone who wants a child of one's own must recognize that somewhere, a woman will bear that child and...

Lack of policy and infrastructure to support breastfeeding in the US means that breastfeeding is made unnecessarily difficult. Breastfeeding is an important public health issue, both for women and children. Growing evidence shows that longer durations of breastfeeding are linked with a lower risk of many costly chronic diseases, including...

As a physician and public health advocate, I am disappointed to see that one of the country's largest formula makers is sponsoring the new Workplace Lactation Toolkit. The toolkit's release in February came on the heels of the federal government's own toolkit, The Business Case for Breastfeeding ....

Breastfeeding saves lives and health care dollars, and promoting breastfeeding rates is one of the government's Healthy People goals. Yet most women do not even meet their own breastfeeding goals, not to mention those set by the government.

Research shows that what a mother and baby experience just in those...