Like many
mommies in Marin, I had my first child in my late 30’s. When I was younger I just didn’t feel ready for motherhood, and didn’t feel the urge to have children. I enjoyed traveling, I worked on my career, and of course I hadn’t yet met my Prince charming. Once I got married and settled down, I started to feel that
maternal clock ticking and finally felt the need to be a mother. When I got pregnant with my first child, I knew immediately that I wanted to
breast-feed my baby.
So I was really interested when the
National Institutes of Health announced the results of a new study that indicates that women who
breast-feed their babies, even if in the
high-risk group of
older moms, gain substantial
anti-cancer benefits by doing so. It’s long been known that women who have children early in life have a lower risk of breast cancer than women who don’t, but apparently the benefits of
breast-feeding can actually
cancel out the
negative effects of delaying childbirth to past the age of 25, which is the average age when women have their first child in the US.
There was a great report on
NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday about the subject; check it out here. I was of course immediately interested, because Marin is an area with a notoriously high rate of breast cancer, and my aunt had it herself (she’s fine now…), so to some degree it runs in my family. The
NPR report also mentioned an interesting
online calculator from the
National Cancer Institute that allows you to estimate your risk for breast cancer. It may be a little anxiety-producing, bet you can
check it out here.
