Why the right way to feed your baby depends on more than facts

Dana was thirty-four weeks pregnant and standing in her own kitchen, staring at a shopping list with two columns crossed out and rewritten twice. Nursing bras or bottles. She could recite the health benefits of breastfeeding by heart, she'd read them in Heidi Murkoff's book a dozen times, and she still couldn't picture herself doing it every three hours for months while also going back to work in ten weeks.

That stuck feeling, Murkoff argues, isn't a failure of research. It's a sign you're trying to solve an emotional question with a factual answer, and it won't work, because the decision runs on two separate tracks that rarely agree at the same time.

The factual track is genuinely lopsided. Breast milk changes its composition throughout a single feeding and across the months to match a baby's exact needs in a way formula can't replicate; breastfed babies get antibodies formula can't supply, tend toward fewer ear and respiratory infections, and nursing mothers recover from childbirth a little faster and face a slightly lower long-term risk of certain cancers. Formula has its own real, practical advantages, though. A bottle-fed baby stays fuller longer between feeds, dad and grandma and an older sibling can all take a turn, and a working mother isn't tied to a pumping schedule.

But feelings don't defer to a spreadsheet. You can find the facts overwhelmingly convincing and still feel averse to nursing. You can want it badly and still worry your temperament, or your return-to-work date, will sabotage it before it starts. Murkoff's answer to that impasse isn't to pick a side by force of will. It's to commit to nothing except a trial: give it somewhere around six weeks, since that's roughly how long it takes most women to establish an actual working relationship with breastfeeding, good or bad. Not a month of gritted teeth deciding whether you're a bad mother if you quit, a genuine, unpressured test drive, after which you're free to make the call feelings alone couldn't make for you at week thirty-four.

If you try it and it isn't for you, Murkoff is direct about what follows: no guilt. A bottle given lovingly, she writes, can do more for a baby than a breast offered grudgingly.

Start by writing the facts and the feelings on two separate lists, since the facts alone were never going to make this decision for you. Line up support before you begin, whether that's a lactation consultant or a partner who's read the same material, because support changes everything. Commit to an actual trial period, something close to six weeks, rather than judging it after one hard afternoon. Track how you and the baby are doing along the way, not to pass or fail yourself, but to gather real information. And whichever way it ends, let go of any guilt attached to it, because a baby fed with love, either way, is getting what she needs.