Hey… World Breastfeeding Week, you’ve forgotten something…. WOMEN!

This World Breastfeeding Week, the WHO and UNICEF are calling on governments to “invest in breastfeeding”. Better support for women during pregnancy and after birth, improved training for health professionals and stronger community services can’t be argued with. But calling for investment on the basis of economic returns doesn’t put women, and their own needs, values and experiences first. Women’s reproductive health and rights so often find themselves justified not because women deserve excellent care and evidence-based information and support, but as means to achieving another goal.

Women and their bodies are not a means to an end and should never be treated as such.

And the question is not just whether we should invest in infant feeding (we absolutely should - it’s a critical part of every woman’s maternity journey), but what we should be investing in. For many women, the gap that needs filling is that created by the absence of good evidence and honest preparation for the realities of feeding their baby. Women repeatedly tell us that they were unprepared for delay in their milk coming in, for pain, for concerns about milk supply. Too often, low milk supply is described as “perceived” rather than investigated, while important questions about delayed lactogenesis, the role of supplementation in establishing breastfeeding, and the biology of lactation remain under- researched.

It is telling we know more about mastitis in dairy cows than in breastfeeding women. If we want better services, we need better science.

It should also include investment in independent information. During World Breastfeeding Week it’s been noted that breastfeeding receives just one week of attention while formula companies market their products all year around. Yet that poorly reflects the experience of many women. Breastfeeding is promoted extensively during pregnancy and postnatally, but many women leave hospital without having had conversations about the feeding options available to them because of restrictions on what healthcare professionals are allowed to discuss. The consequence is that, when women need practical information about formula, it is often the companies themselves who are poised to provide it.

An information vacuum has been created, that gets filled by commercial interests because the current framework has made it so.

If World Breastfeeding Week is to be about investment, then let us invest in women and their needs: in more research to address the actual experiences of women, better preparation, better professional training and genuinely independent, impartial information that enables women to make the choices that are right for them and their families - not to achieve a wider goal, but because that is simply what women need and deserve.

#TeamFeed