Women’s medicine

Lactation Care is women’s health care.

It protects a mother’s heart, breasts and blood sugar as well as her baby’s health.

What Ontario has counted

Ontario has counted the children.

For babies born in Ontario in 2019, suboptimal breastfeeding cost the health system US$72.2 million a year to treat four childhood illnesses, and US$61.0 million more in long-term conditions. Better support would save US$32 to 63 million a year in treatment, and US$23.6 to 51.6 million in long-term costs.

The study’s authors call this a conservative estimate. It leaves out maternal conditions such as breast cancer and diabetes, and they cite research finding that most of the medical cost of suboptimal breastfeeding is maternal. The mothers’ side has not yet been counted in Ontario.

Onah, Hoy and Slofstra, International Breastfeeding Journal, 2025

When the mothers are counted

It is her heart, her breasts and her blood sugar.

In the United States, Bartick and colleagues modelled 1.88 million women from age 15 to 70, comparing current breastfeeding rates with a world where nine in ten mothers breastfed for a year after each birth.

4,981

excess cases of breast cancer

53,847

excess cases of high blood pressure

13,946

excess heart attacks

US$17.4 billion

cost to society from premature death

These are American figures under American conditions. They show the shape of what has not yet been measured in Ontario.

Bartick and colleagues, Obstetrics & Gynecology, 2013

The one part that happens to everybody

Every one of them weans.

More than 140,000 babies are born in Ontario each year and every one of them is weaned, at six days or at two years, with help or without it. Whatever a family decides about feeding, lactation ends, and ending it happens in a woman’s body rather than in her plans.

Done gradually it passes quietly. Done abruptly it means engorgement, blocked ducts and mastitis, and the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine lists rapid weaning among the things that bring mastitis on. It is also lonely. A mother who is stopping is often the one nobody asks about, because the baby is fine. A weaning that hurt stays with a mother, and we meet it again when she is pregnant with her next baby. Seeing her before that baby arrives is how a plan is made for the ending as well as the beginning, so she reaches the goals she sets for herself. That we meet it again is our own observation rather than a published finding.

Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, Clinical Protocol #4: Mastitis

Who the province pays, and the gender pay gap behind it

Every figure on this page, and where it came from.

Onah MN, Hoy S, Slofstra K. The costs of suboptimal breastfeeding in Ontario, Canada, and potential healthcare resource impacts from improving rates: a pediatric health system costing analysis. International Breastfeeding Journal, 2025. doi.org/10.1186/s13006-025-00702-y. Open access.
Bartick MC, Stuebe AM, Schwarz EB, Luongo C, Reinhold AG, Foster EM. Cost analysis of maternal disease associated with suboptimal breastfeeding. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 2013;122(1):111–19. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23743465. United States cohort.
Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. Clinical Protocol #4: Mastitis, revised 2014. abm.memberclicks.net.
Hamid MA, Kumar A and colleagues. Innovative online care: a cross-sectional survey study of online lactation consultation with paediatrician consultation. Paediatrics & Child Health, 2022;27(7):414–20, with Dr Anubha Kumar, IBCLC as second author. Carried out at a clinic other than the Ontario Breastfeeding Clinic. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9732844.

Every source behind every page on this site is on one page: the evidence. If a figure is wrong, write to us and we will correct it. info@clcontario.ca