Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/193

Rh is the lack of maternal nursing. It has been estimated that as many as 70 per cent. of the infants in New York City are bottle-fed, and therefore have only about one tenth the chance for life of the breast-fed child. Some of these mothers are physically unable to nurse their babies, by reason of ill-health, overwork and under-nourishment; but many more could do so if they sufficiently realized the importance of the service.

A third leading cause, operating, of course, among bottle-fed babies and after weaning, is the use of impure milk. Bad air, flies and all other unhealthful conditions naturally affect the babies more quickly than the adult population; yet experts agree that the health of the mother, her successful nursing of her child for several months, at least, and failing this, a supply of clean, sterile cows' milk, are factors of first importance.

To sum up, we find that from one sixth to one tenth of American babies die before they are one year old, and that more than half of these, perhaps nearly all of them, perish because of maternal ignorance or carelessness, or, more fundamentally, because of unjust social conditions and laws which fail to protect the makers of the new generation. It is full time that the mothers of America were roused to a sense of their grievous, their criminal neglect.

First of all, there ought to be an active propaganda among women concerning the importance of maternal nursing. Such a movement is needed most in the so-called educated class, since it is estimated that 60 per cent. of well-to-do women employ artificial feeding, and only about 20 per cent. among the poor. The causes underlying the decline of the American family, such as inordinate love of ease and pleasure, the entrance of women into industrial and professional life, and certain diseases of over-civilization, are doubtless responsible for much of this deterioration in the quality of our motherhood. Yet the convenience and attractive appearance of the various widely advertised baby-foods, and the common use of the obnoxious nursing-bottle, have blinded many mothers to the truth, and not a few allow themselves to be persuaded by meddlesome friends or pretty pictures that this is the modern, sanitary way of bringing up children!

Let every young wife be told bluntly that the woman who fails to nurse her child is but half a mother, and that she deprives herself of one of the sweetest pleasures in life, while robbing her little one of its birthright and enormously reducing its chances of survival, and its vigor if it lives. Tell her that artificial feeding is ten times more troublesome and inconvenient than natural feeding; and that the bottle-fed child, though fat and apparently well-nourished, is far more likely