As if the positive environmental effects of breastfeeding were not enough, it also has uncounted economic value. In her new book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Riane Eisler calls on us to create a caring economy. She says that "to construct an economic system that can help us meet the enormous challenges we face, we must give visibility and value to the socially and economically essential work of caring for people and nature." She states that in our postindustrial economy, the most important capital is "human capital."

Right now, we don't count mothering or breastfeeding in our Gross Domestic Product. What would the GDP look like if we did? While we don't have an exact model yet, here is what some other countries have discovered.

In 2001, the Journal of Australian Political Economy published the research of Julie Smith and her colleagues. Smith says that the Australian Bureau of Statistics includes an estimate for the consumption of commercial baby foods and the production of cow's milk, but excludes mother's milk, whether it is for one's own baby or expressed and given to another baby. This means, according to Smith, that economic growth is boosted by the increased manufacture and sale of infant formula and the higher health care costs that go along with it.

Smith correlated the value of breastmilk in Australia by calculating the cost of replacing breastmilk with infant formula and adding to that the health care costs avoided by breastfeeding. She counted only the costs of five illnesses: gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, otitis media, eczema, and necrotizing enterocolitis. She found the cost of not breastfeeding for the first six months of life in Australia to be between $60 and $120 million a year.

In the US, in 1997, Jan Riordan published an article in the Journal of Human Lactation on the cost savings in health care of breastfeeding when factoring in just four medical diagnoses: respiratory virus, diabetes mellitus, otitis media, and infant diarrhea. She found a potential savings from breastfeeding of $1.3 billion per year.

In the 1990s, it was estimated that if the 51 percent of women then exclusively breastfeeding in India stopped, it would cost $2.3 billion to replace their breastmilk with formula. A 1980s study calculated that Indonesian mothers produced a billion liters of breastmilk annually; the equivalent in formula would cost $400 million. In the late 1990s, one woman received a $400 insurance claim check to compensate her for frozen breastmilk lost when hurricane Fran took down the electricity in her town. And, last but not least, if you had to replace your breastmilk with breastmilk from a milk bank, it would cost you at least $30,000 for a one-year supply.

True Cost Clearinghouse Index