The Politics of Breastfeeding to my family Gabrielle Palmer is a nutritionist and a campaigner She was a breastfeeding counsellor in the 1970s and helped establish the UK pressure group Baby Milk Action In the early 1980s she worked as a volunteer in Mozambique She has written, taught and campaigned on infant feeding issues, particularly the unethical marketing of baby foods In the 1990s she co-directed the International Breastfeeding: Practice and Policy Course at The Institute of Child Health in London until she went to live in China for two years She has worked independently for various health and development agencies, including serving as HIV and Infant Feeding Officer for UNICEF New York She recently worked at The London Schoo of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she had originally studied nutrition She is a mother and a grandmother The Politics of Breastfeeding WHEN BREASTS ARE BAD FOR BUSINESS GABRIELLE PALMER PINTER & MARTIN The Politics of Breastfeeding When breasts are bad for business First published by Pandora Press 1988 This third updated and revised edition first published by Pinter & Martin Ltd 2009, reprinted 2009, 2011 This ebook edition first published 2011 All rights reserved © 2009 Gabrielle Palmer Gabrielle Palmer has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 ISBN 978-1-905177-74-5 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade and otherwise, be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights Pinter & Martin Ltd Effra Parade London SW2 1PS www.pinterandmartin.com contents preface to the third edition why breastfeeding is political the right to call ourselves mammals: the importance of biology how breastfeeding works – and how it was damaged beauty, books and breasts a taste of infant feeding it’s not just the milk that counts your generous donations could more harm than good hiv and breastfeeding life, death and birth 10 population, fertility and sex 11 from the stone age to steam engines: a gallop through history 12 other women’s babies: wet nursing 13 the industrial revolution in britain: the era of progress? 14 markets are not created by god 15 the lure of the global market 16 what is the code? 17 power struggles 18 dying for the code 19 documents and declarations 20 work, economics and the value of mothering 21 ecology, waste and greed epilogue acknowledgments abbreviations and frequently used terms appendix 1: the global strategy summary appendix 2: the innocenti declaration 2005 appendix 3: the ten steps appendix 4: section from the convention on the rights of the child appendix 5: millennium development goals appendix 6: mishaps, recalls and contaminants appendix 7: infant feeding definitions appendix 8: cedaw useful addresses references and notes index illustrations 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Hanging upside down in caves cartoon Exploiting ignorance: Cow & Gate leaflet 2006 Woman bottle-feeding in Costa Rican maternity ward Notice forbidding mothers contact with their newborns Mother and baby in KMC Unit Nurses bottle-feeding newborns in Singapore ward Woman sleeping with her newborn in hospital bed ‘Mum – just let Dad give me a bottle’ cartoon Paternal bliss: Stephen Clark with his son Lewis Baby being fostered after Mynamar cyclone Collecting water, Niger Cooking the family meal, Ethiopia A river may serve as an open sewer, Sierra Leone Egyptian woman breastfeeding her baby in the street Our terror of babies cartoon Why you can’t be a mother and PM cartoon Oversized aristocratic family, including deceased infants Mummified infant from Xinjiang Region, China Advertisement for Borden’s Condensed Milk Glaxo advertisement 1917 Highly complicated formula used in infant feeding Advertisement for Nestlé’s Food, 1912 La Maternité, Nestlé advertisement, 1935 Baby in fancy dress at 1945 Victory party Empire Marketing Board Poster Cow & Gate advertisement published in 1940s/50s UK Nestlé milk nurses in South Africa, 1950s Graphic of baby in bottle for The Baby Killer, 1974 Bear Brand Coffee Creamer label, 2008 Milupa advertisement promoting follow-on milk Philippines product labels with misleading claims Brazilian parents with triplets Millennium dollar coin Ethiopian mother and her baby Mongolian mother suckling her premature twins Mother and baby breastfeed their own way preface to the third edition I wish I were not writing this preface There should be no need for this book In a world beset by overwhelming problems, here is a resolvable issue Twenty years ago when I was writing the first edition, more than three thousand babies were dying every day from infections triggered by lack of breastfeeding and by the use of bottles, artificial milks and other risky products This is still happening In the first and second editions I described the pressures on women, on health workers and on governments I wrote about the culture of artificial feeding and the collusion between the baby food companies and the medical, nutritional and healthcare establishments They have all promoted products and practices which have contributed to the suffering, illness and death of millions of babies and often their mothers too This is still happening This third edition is necessary because some things have changed Scientific research has revealed more amazing facts about breastfeeding It is now known that even in a rich country, a millionaire’s baby who is artificially fed is less healthy than the exclusively breastfed baby of the most disadvantaged mother Long term health problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes are influenced by how babies are fed, and breastfeeding women reduce their own risk of breast cancer Better understanding of women’s bodies shows how adaptable they are and what a resilient process breastfeeding is when it is not sabotaged from the start Knowledge serves no purpose if it is not spread around As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, an entrenched ignorance is kept in place through a culture created and maintained by commercial interests This new edition shows how the baby food and bottle companies use ever more aggressive promotion Challenged by the new evidence, they work harder and pour more resources into more sophisticated marketing strategies; they manipulate the media, influence governments’ policies and infiltrate the very agencies that are supposed to protect health Those who work to combat these influences have become more skilled, but progress is undermined by widespread misinformation and lack of awareness I am so impressed by the talents of groups who struggle for human welfare: the women who support each other, the campaigners and those health workers who strive to cure their colleagues of the nonsense they learn from outdated training and text books and misleading promotional information This book is not written for mothers, but for everyone; man or woman, parent or childless, old or young, because this issue concerns us all I have added some facts and updated others, but the main theme remains unchanged I hope that this will be my last preface and that this book will become merely the record of a tragically foolish phase in human history why breastfeeding is political “From politics it was an easy step to silence.” Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1818 If a multinational company developed a product that was a nutritionally balanced and delicious food, a wonder drug that both prevented and treated disease, cost almost nothing to produce and could be delivered in quantities controlled by consumers’ needs, the announcement of this find would send its shares rocketing to the top of the stock market The scientists who developed the product would win prizes and the wealth and influence of everyone involved would increase dramatically Women have been producing such a miraculous substance, breastmilk, since the beginning of human existence, yet they form the least wealthy and the least powerful half of humanity As subjects of research, breastfeeding and breastmilk have attracted much attention during recent decades, yet as academic careers thrive on discoveries1 of how breastfeeding works and what breastmilk contains, women and their babies are still prevented from fulfilling this unique relationship As knowledge about breastfeeding increases, so global sales of artificial milks and feeding bottles This may surprise those who live where breastfeeding is still part of the culture or where well-educated women have access to support, information and their babies There are policy documents, promotional initiatives and media attention in many countries However, all over the world women are impeded from protecting their own and their babies’ health, and often survival, because of factors beyond their control Why, after about a million years of survival, has one of the principal evolutionary characteristics by which we identify ourselves as mammals become so damaged? Have women been freed from a time-wasting biological tyranny to lead nobler, more fulfilling and more equal lives? In this book I examine the political reasons for a situation which has a profound effect on the whole world from the major economic effects of squandering a natural resource to the individual misery of a sick child or an unhappy woman Why is it that whether we were breastfed ourselves, or breastfeed our own children, depends on our social and economic position? How is it that in many societies, 100% of poor, undernourished women all breastfeed easily, while in others, groups of privileged, well-nourished women believe they cannot? Why is the right to breastfeed fought for so vehemently by some women and rejected so forcefully by others, often according to their class, education or society? And why, if women participate in the modern economic structures which are claimed to be for the benefit of us all, must the breastfeeding relationship be curtailed and restricted? For many women, what could be a simple compromise becomes an agonising decision power and sex ‘Politics’ does not only refer to economic and territorial power structures, it also means sexual politics The fact of women’s separate biological capacities has been used as a pretext for excluding ... grandmother The Politics of Breastfeeding WHEN BREASTS ARE BAD FOR BUSINESS GABRIELLE PALMER PINTER & MARTIN The Politics of Breastfeeding When breasts are bad for business First published by... responsibility for the care of babies and children Even in Scandinavia, where legislation and tax-incentives encourage fathers to more, for the most part mothers remain the principal carers In most of the. .. revealed the risks of not breastfeeding, there is no excuse for the medical and commercial promoters of substitute milks to continue their practices, but many are so caught up in the whirlwind of career