8 Ways to Promote, Preserve and Protect Breastfeeding When Your Government Won’t

I usually do an intro to blogs, but this one doesn’t need an into-unless you missed this week’s NYT article about Trump’s administration’s opposition to global breastfeeding protection, preservation and support (which also stated that the US bullied other countries into opposing) in order to create fruitful ground for formula companies. If you missed it, take a moment to read it and weap, and then come back here to learn what you can do ASAP.
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​1. Educate yourself on the history of formula company and government loyalties

Read Gabrielle Palmer’s The Politics of Breastfeeding or Kimberly Seals-Allers’ The Big Letdown. These books will help you understand how formula companies are as predatory as tobacco companies, how breastfeeding was stolen from humanity by pharmaceuticals and the dairy industry, and give you every reason on earth to fight to renormalize human milk for human babies.
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2. Read the WHO Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes

This will give you a toolbox of how not to market your business and services in ways that perpetuate artificial infant feeding as norm. Read it and pledge to follow it in all of your personal and business dealings.
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1. 3. Encourage expectant parents to ask their birth professionals about their affiliations with companies that make artificial baby milk before hiring them

If a birth profesional has loyalties or gets royalties from formula companies or formula company reps, they will likely not be the birth professionals that will help families reach breastfeeding goals.
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1. 4. Stop sharing formula company propaganda

Sharing mushy-gushy formula company internet commercials about “sisterhoods” makes you complicit in predatory practices and distract you from the main issue . Formula companies prey on vulnerabilities of new families by attaching feel-good sentiments and “permissions to surrender” to their commercials, seeming to diffuse (yet perpetuate) controversial topics, such as “mommy wars”. While these commercials seem to be advocating for inclusion, know that they are actually ploys to ensure and grow a market. Without mommy-wars or mommy-guilt formula companies’ market share would be much smaller. Sharing these feel-good videos adds fuel to a fire, not water.
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5. Stop amplifying the “Fed is Best” movement that encourages complacency in infant feeding and early breastfeeding cessation

Instead of shrugging your shoulders and simply agreeing with “Fed is Best”, ask “Fed WHAT is best?”, and then ask yourselves:

Was everything done to fix breastfeeding before replacing it? If the answer is no, then make all efforts to fix breastfeeding (like reaching out to a breastfeeding professional, or another mom who has experience in overcoming breastfeeding issues). If the issue still couldn’t be fixed, the next option to preserve a baby’s right to have breastmilk is to receive a mother’s own hand-expressed of pumped milk- and if that can’t be had, then seeking donor human milk/wet-nurse is the last step to exhaust before choosing PROPERLY PREPARED infant formula, made with clean water in hygienic conditions.

Asking these questions before dismissing a baby’s right to human milk by easily accepting the FIB mentality will keep you from amplifying the FIB hidden message that formula-fed is best.
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6. Ironically, stop demonizing infant formula

When properly prepared, formula can lead to the survival of babies whose caregivers don’t have access to human milk. Artificial baby milk DOES have a place in the infant-feeding realm (but it doesn’t have first place, or even second or third place, as mentioned above) and demonizing it under all conditions just feeds in to the mommy-war and guilt rhetoric, and gives the formula industry more reason to invest their wealth in making families feel less of the guilt we place on them by snubbing their feeding method.
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7. Realize that formula can be dangerous here in the US, too

Yes, #6 asked you to stop demonizing formula, yet #7 is telling you it can be dangerous? Yep.

Before going on a soapbox that improperly prepared infant formula doesn’t exist in developed countries, let me go on mine:

Improper formula preparation is not an issue exclusive to underdeveloped countries. Framing it as a third-world issue separates us from our domenstic reality. Something as easy to do as overdiluting formula to “make it last” or to “add calories” or to “hydrate a constipated baby” (all excuses I’ve heard) can very much harm or kill a baby. Add those common issues to the likely more common issue of formula that’s been handled unhygienically, left unrefrigerated too long, or prepared with tap water (which is soooooo often done in household of all “levels” here in the US) and you have many US families preparing formula incorrectly.

Needless to say, if these are issues in a country whose water supplies we deem “safe”, and literacy rates considered higher than underdeveloped countries, then think about parts of the world with less than perfect sanitation conditions, language barriers to preparation instructions when “well-meaning” corporate donations from the US land somewhere where families can’t read (or can’t read the formula label’s language).

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8. Understand your local, national and global breast feeding support landscape

Whether it’s starting your community’s first breastfeeding coalition or support group, to joining efforts in existing ones, to learning what you can do with national efforts and international efforts will put you on the right side of preserving, promoting and supporting breastfeeding.

Since there are too many to list completely, please link your local resources and the cities they serve in the comments, as well as listing national and international advocacy groups.

Lets cummulatively do for our babies what our government won’t!

💜,
​laura

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