The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business - Softcover

Gabrielle Palmer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190517716X ISBN 13: 9781905177165

Publisher: Pinter & Martin Ltd., 2009

Synopsis

A truly 'life-changing' book.ABM

This book is the most profound exploration of the global and personal costs of artificial feeding I have encountered. It is heartbreaking, challenging, and a page-turner. Anna Swisher, ILCA

There are many people who prefer to focus on the beauty of breastfeeding, and don't want to look behind the scenes; don't want to look how, why, when and where breasts 'are bad for business', or that a baby dies every thirty seconds due to lack of breastfeeding and the use of bottles and counterfeit milks. This is a book to awaken the masses, to make us sit up and notice. If only we would. Countless breastfeeding books exist, but few with the passion, integrity and importance of this one. Veronika Robinson - The Mother

This book is authoritative about the evidence for breastfeeding, while making one's blood boil about the folly and, alas sometimes, venality of the social and commercial forces that stop this vital function of early life and parenting from being the norm. It's a great read. Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, City University London

As revealing as Freakonomics, shocking as Fast Food Nation and thought provoking as No Logo, The Politics of Breastfeeding exposes infant feeding as one of the most important public health issues of our time.

Every thirty seconds a baby dies from infections due to a lack of breastfeeding and the use of bottles, artificial milks and other risky products. In her powerful book Gabrielle Palmer describes how big business uses subtle techniques to pressure parents to use alternatives to breastmilk. The infant feeding product companies thirst for profit systematically undermines mothers confidence in their ability to breastfeed their babies.

An essential and inspirational eye-opener, The Politics of Breastfeeding challenges our complacency about how we feed our children and radically reappraises a subject which concerns not only mothers, but everyone: man or woman, parent or childless, old or young.

3rd fully revised and updated edition.

About this title

About the Author:

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 lived and 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 School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she had originally studied nutrition. She is a mother and a grandmother.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

chapter 1: why breastfeeding is political (excerpt)

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 discoveries 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 do 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pinter & Martin Ltd.
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 190517716X
• ISBN 13: 9781905177165
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 432