A mother from Sweden has this to say about ecological breastfeeding.
“Thank you, Lord, for eco-breastfeeding.
Sheila, it’s wonderful that you and John keep promoting and informing about eco-bf; it’s every mother’s right to know about this.
On that note, Olivia is 18 months old now and still keeping me in breastfeeding amenorrhea. It will be exciting to see for how long. Both my husband and I are looking forward to having a third child, but not yet. It’s so awesome how good it all is when we stay in tune with nature; we would have felt quite overwhelmed had I gotten pregnant before now. With proper spacing, there is so much joy and room to celebrate each new family member. Nursing on cue still, it is likely that we will have a few months more before conceiving. I am so grateful to God for this gift! I am so grateful to Him to know that this is indeed His plan; that we don’t have to stretch ourselves too thin and put a strain on our family to do His will. This is actually His will!
Until reading your book, I accepted openness to life as something that sometimes would almost “kill” parents, wreck the mother’s health and make the children suffer. I accepted it as a sacrifice to respect God’s command to multiply and be fruitful. I accepted that in some cases, this suffering was the only option, since it seemed to me that some women were “more fertile” than others. But it never really made sense to me, it wasn’t logical. There was discord, and God is not a chaotic God who doesn’t think of the consequences. Animals don’t end up in this situation. They are made for what they take on, so why were we different, or worse off? Now, everything is all too clear to me, even historically, and I feel like we’re at a time when we discover that the earth is actually not flat but round, if you see what I mean.
What Catholics usually do is to live “naturally” in the sense that they refrain from artificial contraception, but they don’t always have a natural mothering style, so then they are only following God’s plan half-way. Using contraception and ‘having a child every year’ are two extremes. Neither lifestyle is balanced, and what’s more, neither is God’s intention for the human family.
It’s so awesome and cool that Olivia is actually “securing” the care she needs from us, and in particular from me, through nursing; she is postponing the arrival of a sibling because it is best for her. God is such a genius to have created our female bodies this way! He thought of everything.
Anyway, this was a long email, I’m just so excited about this! May God bless you and your family!”
Mariola O’Brien runs the website Responsive Parenting (www.responsiveparenting.net) together with a friend, and blogs at Continuum Mama (www.mariolaobrien.blogspot.se)
Next week: Her comments regarding natural child spacing with her first baby.
Sheila: When I read Mariola’s letter, I remembered a conversation I had two years ago with a Kenyan mother who had been given our manual by a friend. Her main comment was that her people had no need for this book. They use only breastfeeding to space their babies. We have been promoting natural birth spacing via breastfeeding for over 45 years. In 1995 Saint John Paul II endorsed the recommendation of UNICEF for mothers to breastfeed for at least two years. My hunch is that if the Church as a whole would accept that counsel, there would be far fewer couples resorting to contraception.