The Politics of Breastfeeding (An Advocacy Perspective)

Bismillah,, this is one part which I take to share from book "Food and Culture" A Reader. This part written by Penny Van Esterik The Development of the Controversy Throughout history, women have substituted animal milks or wetnursing for maternal breastfeeding. This is, however, the first time in history when infats lived through these experiments long enough for others to measure the impacts on their health. This is also the first time that huge industries have promoted certain options for women, and profited from mothers’ decisions not to breastfeed or to supplement breastmilk with a commeercial product. It is this historical and economic fact that requires us to place breastfeeding in a broad political context. An early presentation on the problem of bottle feeding may be traced to a Rotary Club address made by Dr. Cicely Williams in 1939 entitled “Milk and Murder”. She argued that the increased morbidity and mortality seen in Singapore infants was indirecty attributable to the increase in bottle feeding with inappropriate breastmilk substitues, and the decline of breastfeeding. and she dared to call this murder—not something that happens ti poor people over there, but murder. Her words:

If you are legar purists, you may wish me to change the title of this adress to Milk and Manslaughter. But if your lives were embittered as mine is, by seeig day after day this massacre of the innocents by unsuitable feeding, then I believe you would feel as I do thet misguded propaganda on infat feeding should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition, and that these deaths should be regarded as murder. (Williams, 1986:70)

Hhmm,,, what about our country?