Letters to the Editor
evelynlouise
Published Letters: 11 Editor's Choice: 6
-
contextual information
[Read the article: Baby, we were born to breast-feed?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Here's a little contextual info about these billboards:
1. The New York Times, 20/20, and Hipmama.com have all thoroughly covered the formula industry's horrifying efforts to muzzle the Department of Health and Human Service's public health ad campaign to promote breastfeeding. The billboards are part of a watered-down version Tommy Thompsom's HHS agreed to under pressure from the formula industry. These billboards have been around for almost two years.
2. The Department of Health and Human Services, the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, The American Academy of Family Physicians and many other similar groups around the world have all issued very strong recommendations regarding breastfeeding. They do this not to make women feel guilty but to convey to the public that several decades worth of research show not only that breastfeeding is beneficial but that not breastfeeding is risky -- both for mothers' and babies' health. In the summer of 2002, a front page above-the-fold article in the Washington Post reported on a meta-study indicating that breastfeeding was not only a factor, but the primary factor when it came to women's protection against breast cancer. When the lead author was interviewed on Talk of the Nation, she came across not as a breastfeeding supporter but as a scientist who wanted to figure out how to pass this protection against cancer on to women who don't breastfeed in their life time.
3. The formula industry, which is a subsidiary of both the food and pharmaceutical industries, routinely works to play down and cast doubt on the research which has confirmed again and again that not breastfeeding is risky. They stand to lose billions if women around the world were to follow research-based, medically-endorsed reccommendations for feeding their babies. We all know that the industry has peddled formula (some of it faulty) in developing-world countries where there is not enough clean water to mix the formula and where breastfeeding rates had previously been near 100%. That industry, like so many others, has a cozy relationship with the Bush administration and has been free from all sorts of restrictions that would keep it from hurting public health to the extent that it does now.
Maybe the billboard rubs some the wrong way (maybe it would have been better without industry pressure), but does Ms. Traister really think we should refrain from educating the public about the importance of breastfeeding? Yep, American women don't get enough paid maternity leave. They also don't get adequate time and facilities for pumping milk in the work place. They also get routinely terrible advice from medical professionals regarding breastfeeding. And they get all sorts of pressure from friends, family, and strangers to either not breastfeed or to hide whenever they do it. And, as Ms. Traister points out, a small percentage of women face physiological barriers to breastfeeding.
To me all of this suggests not that we should keep quiet about breastfeeding, but that all of us who care about women's, children's and public health have a lot of work to do to make our society more breastfeeding friendly. I am an American living in Britain, where all female employees get six-months paid maternity leave (which just happens to be the length of time babies should be exclusively breastfed). American women should have that. We should have health care professionals who give us accurate information about breastfeeding and who give women who cannot breastfeed fully or at all information about ways to partially breastfeed or provide donor milk for their children. We should be able to go family gatherings, Victoria's Secret or, really, anywhere without being harrasssed if we breastfeed. And we should have work place policies that allow us to continue to provide our milk to our children for as long as we see fit.
As Ms. Traister notes, La Leche League is an appropriate place to go for breastfeeding support, but her suggestion that the Department of Health and Human Services should not promote breastfeeding seems based on misinformation and misunderstanding. But maybe they should promote it with a slightly different slant: American women who do not breastfeed due to any of a number of obstacles should not feel guilty, but those who erect those obstacles are the ones who should be deeply ashamed.
Perhaps Broadsheet could do more (they already have, much to my delight) to shame those offenders.
Women deserve to make an informed and umimpeded choice when it comes to breastfeeding.
But can we all desist from the tired old suggestion that any positive statements about breastfeeding should be silenced to somehow protect women from guilt? When we say that, we're simply doing the formula industry's bidding, not to mention making very patronizing assumptions about the delicate sensibilities of other women.