There are substances in breast milk, which cannot be reproduced. You alone can provide these living factors for your baby. Breastfeeding is a really positive thing to do. It is not only good for your baby, it is good for you. The advantages are numerous.

The main advantages of breastfeeding for your baby
* Breast milk is the only food specifically designed, by nature, to meet your baby's individual needs.
* It contains the right balance of nutrients in a very easily digestible form.
* Antibodies are passed on through breast milk to protect your baby from all kinds of infection. The longer you can feed your baby the better but if you breastfeed for the first three or four months this protection can last for up to a year.
* Your baby is much less likely to need to be admitted to hospital.
* Your baby is less likely to develop diarrhoea or constipation.
* Breastfeeding reduced the incidence of allergies such as eczema and asthma.
* Breast milk contains growth factors and hormones to help your baby's development. These cannot be reproduced in formula milk. Children who have breast fed for eight months or more have been shown to achieve more at school than those who have been bottle fed.

The main advantages of breastfeeding for you
* Breastfeeding helps your body to return to normal after the birth and burns up to 500 calories a day.
* Breast milk is always ready and it costs nothing
* Women who breastfeed often feel a special bond with their baby and may be less likely to develop postnatal depression.
* Breastfeeding may offer you some protection against developing ovarian cancer, breast cancer and hip fractures.

Emma.

It figures in Plato’s writing in the Symposium, through the words of Diotima. Although Plato puts the reproduction of ideas higher in the hierarchy of goods he describes there, reproduction of children gets a high place, much higher than, say, financial welfare.

It also plays a key role in Aristotle’s thought.

After the Greeks, though, moral theories became more individualistic. It’s then open to think of having children as minimizing one’s welfare.

“Perhaps I missed something but I fail to see how his comment leads to the conclusion that there is an inherent duty to procreate.”

For Ross, there certainly is a duty to procreate: it’s the cost of membership in the Catholic tribe. Members of different tribes don’t have that cost, and that’s what makes Ross so nervous.

Different religions optimize differently. The evolutionary stable strategy for Catholicism is to maximize the number of children in Catholic families. That might explain why the Catholic church is so hostile to gays, since if there were certain Catholics who didn’t have to assume the cost of children (here I’m assuming that gays have fewer children than straights), then that would weaken the justification for requiring that Catholics sire many children.

What Ross is really doing is trying to level the playing field between adherents of Catholicism and everyone else, by forcing everyone to assume the same child-bearing cost as Catholics have, thus nullifying the advantage.

It’s the same reason why the epithet “Cafeteria Catholic” is hurled at Catholics (by other Catholics) who only loosely conform to Catholic doctrine. Those Catholics that strictly follow the party line are assuming a greater “cost” for being Catholic, so they attempt to shame less-strict Catholics into behaving in the same, more-strict way, so that the cost of membership is shared equally.

(Yet another example: in season 2 of Sopranos, Big Pussy’s wife confesses to Carmella that she’s thinking of leaving him. Instead of expressing sympathy for having to live with an uncaring spouse (that is, actually supporting the wife’s desire to end her marriage to Big Pussy), Carmella responds by arguing that Catholics don’t believe in divorce. By convincing Big Pussy’s to stay in the marriage, Carmella ensures that the cost of being a mobster’s wife is the same for all the wives.)

“What Ross seems to have offered us is a little bit of autobiography: he thinks he has some kind of duty to sire a big family.”

I interpret Ross’s post as an apologia for Roman Catholicism. The Catholic church has a single goal: to perpetuate Catholicism, and they know the best way to do that is to convince Catholics to have large families, and to raise their children as Catholics. All religions do this, of course (well, except the Shakers — and look what happened to them).

It reminds me of Wendy Shalit’s book A Return To Modesty, which makes a different argument (about female sexuality) but is basically an apologia for Orthodox Judaism. Both authors are describing how different religious groups use different strategies to survive in a competitive religious ecosystem.

Evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics provide useful models for interpreting such phenomena. It’s a pity that Ross is unable to peek outside his religious blinkers — but that’s just what the religion meme is designed to do. They don’t call religious belief a “worldview” for nothing!

The point has bite since monks and nuns may be the most solipsistic people in the world. Maybe it’s not the deplorable kind, though. Who knows?