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As a pediatrician, she helped elevate breastfeeding from a medical afterthought to a specialty of its own. As a mother of nine, she practiced what she preached.
Oct. 23, 2025Updated 6:24 p.m. ET
Ruth A. Lawrence, a pediatrician who almost single-handedly elevated breastfeeding from a medical afterthought to a distinct specialty, igniting a revolution in the education of physicians and support for nursing mothers, died on Oct. 12 in Rochester, N.Y. She was 101.
Her death, in a care home, was announced by the University of Rochester Medical Center, where she founded the Breastfeeding and Human Lactation Study Center. It was among the first organizations in the country to offer feeding guidance and resources to caregivers of newborn mothers.
A stylish dresser who always took the stairs, even in heels, Dr. Lawrence was a force. She wrote the most widely used scientific textbook on lactation, helped start the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine and was an authoritative, soothing voice in what has become a fiercely debated topic.
“Dr. Lawrence helped establish breastfeeding as the norm, first of all, and then as an important public health priority,” Lori Feldman-Winter, a pediatrician and Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine board member, said in an interview. “She really set the path for creating an entirely new medical field to the benefit of so many women and children.”
Dr. Lawrence was not an absolutist about breastfeeding, a practice many women find physically, emotionally and logistically difficult, if not impossible.
“But I think breastfeeding is very important,” she said in an oral history interview with the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014. “It’s not just what’s for lunch. It was Mother Nature’s plan to protect the child, to facilitate the best growth possible.”
Dr. Lawrence became interested in breastfeeding in the early 1950s, when she was one of the first female residents at the Yale School of Medicine. There, she trained under Edith B. Jackson, a pediatrician and the pioneer of rooming-in, a practice in which babies are placed in cribs next to their mothers’ hospital beds.
“It was the only residency in the country where you had to spend time in newborns,” Dr. Lawrence said in the oral history. “So, as an intern, you had to see the babies in the rooming-in unit. You had to see the mothers, most of whom were breastfeeding.”
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A year into her residency, she gave birth to Robert, the first of her nine children — all of whom were breastfed. After taking three days of maternity leave, she went back to seeing patients, manually expressing her milk on breaks and feeding him in the same rooming-in unit where she worked.
After finishing her residency in 1952, Dr. Lawrence became the first woman to join the faculty of the University of Rochester Medical Center. At the time, new mothers were increasingly forgoing breastfeeding, opting to use formula.
Dr. Lawrence started a rooming-in program to encourage breastfeeding, extolling its benefits to anyone who would listen.
“People would ask me a question,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Well, who said so?’ or, ‘What’s the evidence?’” So Dr. Lawrence loaded a small filing cabinet with studies about breast milk and traveled around the hospital with it.
“We tried to help mothers feel comfortable with their babies,” she said in a 2019 video interview. “That’s the biggest problem, and we gradually got a breastfeeding culture here.”
Word of her expertise spread.
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Soon, she was receiving calls from physicians and women’s groups around the country. Dr. Lawrence decided to write a textbook about the science and practice of breastfeeding. Originally published in 1980, “Breastfeeding: A Guide for the Medical Profession,” is now in its ninth edition.
“My purpose was not to make a bundle of bucks,” she said in the oral history. “My purpose was to spread the knowledge and to make people aware, and to put some science behind it.”
The book became a kind of bible of breastfeeding, elevating Dr. Lawrence to international prominence. She appeared on “The Today Show,” was interviewed by newspapers around the world and became a vocal critic of formula companies that marketed their products as better than human milk.
In 1984, C. Everett Koop, the U.S. Surgeon General, appointed Dr. Lawrence to lead a committee of breastfeeding experts. The group traveled to the Vatican for a conference. Dr. Lawrence and her husband, Bob Lawrence, a radiologist, met with Pope John Paul II.
Assuming she was just a wife along for the trip, the Pope thanked her husband for his work on breastfeeding.
“In her typical grace, she simply smiled and thanked him,” Dr. Lawrence’s daughter, Joan Lawrence, said in an email. “Proper credit for the work was not important to her; the global cause for breastfeeding was.”
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Ruth Edna Anderson was born on Aug. 15, 1924, in Brooklyn and grew up in Westchester County. Her father, Stephen Anderson, was an electrical engineer and inventor. Her mother, Loretta (Harvey) Anderson, was a secretary and tennis coach.
Ruth’s mother breastfed her in the hospital, along with dozens of other babies.
“Every day, they would just keep bringing her babies whose mothers didn’t have enough milk, and she would nurse them as well,” Dr. Lawrence recalled in the oral history. “She was very into breastfeeding and wouldn’t have thought of doing anything else.”
When Ruth was 10, her father died in a car accident. She and her sister babysat and cleaned houses to help their mother pay the bills.
After graduating in 1945 from Antioch College in Ohio with a degree in biology, Ruth enrolled in medical school at the University of Rochester. She was one of 10 women in a class of 70.
Maternal health wasn’t a priority for students.
“We didn’t see newborns,” she said. “The attitude toward preemies was, well, if they lived, they lived.”
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Looking back on her life, Dr. Lawrence was astonished by where she wound up.
“As I say, if somebody told me this is where I’d go when I was in medical school, I would have doubted it completely,” she said in the oral history. “In fact, I didn’t think I’d spend time with babies, because we’d walk right by the preemie nursery and not even look in.”
She helped start the journal Breastfeeding Medicine in 2005 and continued working well into her 90s, traveling to deliver lectures about breastfeeding.
“Simply put, she changed our approach to the practice of infant feeding and thus to the ultimate benefit of improved health of both the mother and infant worldwide,” Arthur I. Eidelman, the journal’s editor, wrote earlier this year in a special issue celebrating her career.
Dr. Lawrence and her husband were married for 55 years until his death in 2005. Their son John Lawrence died of cancer in 2008.
In addition to their daughter Joan, she is survived by seven other children, Robert Lawrence, Barbara L. Asselin, Timothy Lawrence, Kathleen Lawrence, David Lawrence, Mary Khalil and Stephen Lawrence; 24 grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.
As much as Dr. Lawrence’s textbook made her an expert in the medical world, her breastfeeding of so many of her own children bestowed on her an undeniable credibility when speaking to new mothers.
She was often asked by new moms how she had managed — not once or twice, but nine times.
“If you’re going to cook dinner,” she said, “you might as well cook a lot of it.”
