Advantages of Bottle Feeding

There are many benefits from bottle-feeding. Some of the reasons a women would not want to breastfeed are as follows and are all legitimate:

You simply do not want to breastfeed. If you are not completely sure about it or feel that you really don’t want to, it will not work. Learning to breastfeed requires of a lot of trying and failing and is not easy at first therefore for someone who actually does not want to do it, it will just turn into a frustrating experience.

Bottle-feeding adjusts more to your lifestyle because you work. Although there are mothers that work and still breastfeed, it is not always possible for everyone to do so.

If you were to have a chronic infection – such as HIV for example, - bottle-feeding will ensure the infection is not transmitted to the baby through the breast milk. Mothers that have hepatitis B can feed their babies as long as the baby has been vaccinated against hepatitis B.

There are occasions in which both the baby and the mother are too sick after the delivery and bottle-feeding is sometimes the only option in these cases. If the mother or the baby is in the intensive care unit, breastfeeding is definitely not the convenient thing to do. In these cases the mother can pump her breast milk out and freeze it to then be used for the baby in the baby’s bottle. If the baby cannot drink the breast milk yet due to a complication, you can still store the breast milk for up to six months and feed it to the baby after the problem is done with. In order to keep your breast milk production up it will be necessary to pump your milk out. On occasions mothers have been able to increase the amount of breast milk they produce afterwards, but it is something that is not always possible and many times a special lactating adviser is needed to achieve it.

If you have had breast surgery, bottle-feeding might be a better option, as there are occasion in which the mother is simply not allowed to breastfeed. There is no evidence that breastfeeding has an effect on making breast cancer worse after the mother has already been diagnosed with it, but in cases in which a mother has had a surgery on her breasts or is receiving some type of treatment, breastfeeding it out of the question. There is also evidence that women that have had breast implants produce less milk, however often times they will produce enough to feed their baby anyways.

In the case of women that are taking certain strong medications, bottle-feeding may be a better option. There are certain medications that will pass onto the breast milk and that can have a harmful effect on the baby. The types of drugs that are taken and that can harm a baby are medications against cancer and leukemia, migraine medication amongst others. Talk to your doctor about this if you take strong medications.