Breastmilk is a human right
Greetings to all breastfeeding women! It’s World Breastfeeding Week and what better time to take a rights-based approach to breastfeeding?
We all have a right to health. More fully expressed, it is a right to the "highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." Well, the highest available standard of health, both in infancy and throughout life, is attained by breastfeeding, no question. Babies fed formula rather than breastmilk are:
- five times more likely to be hospitalised for gastroenteritis
- twice as likely to get diarrhoea (‘even’ in the First World)
- twice as likely to get inner-ear infections
- five times as likely to get urinary tract infections
- twice as likely to get Type 1 diabetes
- more than five times as likely to develop a lymphoma (cancer) before the age of 15.
Over their lifetime, breastfed babies are less likely to develop multiple sclerosis, coronary heart disease, obesity, hyperactivity, coeliac disease, autoimmune thyroid disease or dental problems.
Breastfeeding has important benefits to the mother’s health as well, such as reducing the incidence of osteoporosis, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
Current WHO and UNICEF advice to achieve optimal infant health is to breastfeed exclusively for the first 6 months of life (delaying other fluids and all solids until 6 months of age) and then to continue breastfeeding until at least 2 years of age. In some societies 2 years might seem like a long time, but bear in mind that in global terms, the average duration of breastfeeding each child is more than 4 years.
A formula-fed baby is up to five times as likely to die from SIDS and twice as likely to die from any cause in the first six weeks as a breastfed baby. UNICEF estimates that 1.5 million babies’ lives could be saved annually by 6 months’ exclusive breastfeeding alone. So the right to life is also at stake.
Just because breastmilk is a human right, doesn’t imply that families should be treated in any sort of coercive or punitive way. Far from it. The State’s role in fulfilling this human right lies in actively supporting breastfeeding by, inter alia, ensuring women can breastfeed whenever and wherever they choose, including after returning to paid employment, providing skilled support if they have any difficulty breastfeeding, (and, to help prevent such difficulties or discrimination) promoting breastfeeding education for women, their partners, health professionals and all of society.
This obligation on all governments to support breastfeeding is made explicit in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states (somewhat clumsily, but authoritatively) that every child has a right to:
"the highest attainable standard of health . . . States Parties shall . . . ensure that all segments of society, in particular parents and children, are informed, have access to education and are supported in the use of basic knowledge of child health and nutrition [and] the advantages of breastfeeding."
Finally and importantly, human rights also demand that governments act to suppress false claims made by infant formula manufacturers. There are rich and powerful companies manufacturing infant formula and aggressively, shamelessly marketing it as an equivalent of breastmilk. Let’s be perfectly clear: it’s not. It’s not even second-best. The mother’s expressed breastmilk (in a cup or bottle) and breastmilk from a wet-nurse or milk bank are second- and third-best, according to the WHO. Infant formula comes a distant fourth.
The WHO calls on all states to review compliance with the International Code of Marketing of Breast milk Substitutes and to enact "new legislation or additional measures as needed to protect families from adverse commercial influences."
The British Government, for instance, spends 14 pence per baby supporting breastfeeding. Compare this with £20 per baby spent by predatory formula manufacturers to promote ‘baby junk food’. Both parties, I would argue, are violating the right to health. Governments have an obligation to respect, protect and promote human rights. ‘Protecting’ rights means acting to prevent violations by third parties. Modern human rights theory — and international law at least as far back as the Slavery Convention of 1926 — recognise the capacity of non-state entities to violate rights.
Whether or not you’ve ever lactated, or were ever breastfed, mark World Breastfeeding Week and help protect infant health by reporting on any unethical marketing of infant formula or baby food in your local media, supermarket, hospital or doctor’s surgery — an easy and practical way to protect human rights.
Dear Olivia,
thankyou for this post. (Do we even have milk banks here in Australia? Is this a real option for mothers who cannot breastfeed?)
all good wishes,
Julie.
Australia is unusual as an affluent country without a milk bank. Radio National recently did a story on this very subject, interviewing a couple of people involved in establishing a private milk bank in Queensland. There are plenty of other people in Australia keen to start milk banks, which is encouraging. There seems to be plenty of breastmilk going to waste and lots of babies who need it.
Fantastic Olivia, and you know I support you on this! And I didnt realise the world wide average for breastfeeding was over four years. I would be very interested if a milk bank started in Australia as my body has nearly had enough!!! Do you happen to know what countries have the longest average and why?
Love Catherine…
Dr Katherine Dettwyler, an anthropologist at Texas A & M University, has tried to establish empirically what the natural age for human weaning would be, independent of culture. She draws on data from different countries, and makes comparisons with other species. She questions the 4.2-year global average (a figure I got from the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne) but concludes none the less that humans naturally wean anywhere between 2.5 and 7 years of age.
[…] Nestlé is just the worst of a number of transnational corporations that market infant formula and other products as a substitutes for breastmilk. This is illegal and unethical because there are serious health risks associated with not breastfeeding babies. I am amazed at the number of immediate and life-long health benefits of breastfeeding demonstrated by mounting medical research. To summarise, babies that are not optimally breastfed have increased risk of: […]