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Abstract

The woman’s experience of breast-feeding her infant is a natural extension of two other profound female experiences: pregnancy and childbirth. These three interrelated functions, the capacities to bear children, to bring them into the world, and to provide the newborn with life-sustaining nutriment, are reproductive capacities limited to the female sex. They are all creative processes in the original meaning of that term, since without them the basic genetic unit formed by a man and woman at the moment of conception would be unable to develop into a growing fetus, a newborn infant, and a healthy child. Thus, these capacities are essential to the creation and maintenance of new life and the preservation of our species.

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© 1988 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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Cresci, M.B.M. (1988). The Nursing Experience. In: Offerman-Zuckerberg, J. (eds) Critical Psychophysical Passages in the Life of a Woman. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-5362-1_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-5362-1_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-5364-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-5362-1

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