Have you heard the news? (link includes video) New York City is doing away with all formula advertisements, posters, baby bottles, and formula samples in hospitals. Instead of formula freebies, which is what most hospitals across the country and in many parts of the world do (this is against the baby-friendly initiatives devised by the WHO and UNICEF, btw), NYC hospitals will now give away a mini cooler for breast milk, a baby outfit that says “I Eat At Mom’s,” breast pumps… And and and… This is the best part… The hospital policy from now on will be to put the baby to the mom’s breast in the delivery or recovery room within an hour after birth!! YEAH! No unnecessary hospital separations for mom and baby before they’ve gotten a chance to try breastfeeding! Woo-hoo! If I could re-elect mayor Bloomberg, the man responsible for making these new policies the law, I would.

Something I found absurd: A quote by a woman who allegedly disagrees with the ban was, “That doesn’t mean that those people have the nutrition or the education to support it [breastfeeding]. It [formula] should be an option.” This comment was made by a woman who claims she breastfed her child for five years. I think her comment must have either been taken out of context or she’s not understanding the policy. The policy doesn’t mean a woman can’t choose whether or not to formula-feed her child. A woman living in NYC can choose to feed her kid whatever she wants, even with the breastfeeding-friendly initiatives in place. She can even still request to have her child be formula-fed in the hospital; that hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the formula isn’t being shoved in new mothers’ faces, giving the implication, since it is being given away by health professionals unbidden, that it is somehow better than what their own bodies can produce. Breastfeeding is the biological norm, not bottle-feeding, so it would only make sense for hospitals and other health care facilities to support it this way, which unfortunately, most of them in the United States do NOT.

The education for breastfeeding that the commenter says people lack is finally happening all over NYC (and New York state for that matter), which is part of what makes this program so brilliant. Furthermore, to address her “nutrition” concern, you could eat McDonald’s and breastfeed and your breast milk would still be of higher quality than even the best formula you could buy, which should tell you a lot about how inferior formula really is. I didn’t examine all the ins and outs of the program, so I don’t know if extra help will be given to women in the nutrition department, but I believe WIC provides low-income women with extra food allowances if they choose to breastfeed.

The more I think about it, the more I think the woman who commented was asked, “What do you think of the new ban on formula in NYC?” Which can be interpreted to mean, “What do you think of banning all formula in NYC and disallowing women to formula-feed their children?” If that were the case, then her answer is totally reasonable.

Another commenter said, “I don’t think that is something that should be held against the mother [if she doesn’t breastfeed].” I agree with this, definitely, 100%. As someone who has to supplement with formula, and who has to use bottles because the breastfeeding didn’t work out, I am painfully aware that some situations warrant bottle and/or formula use. No woman should ever have to explain why she’s using a bottle to feed her baby. However, a lot of bottle-feeding is initiated because of a lack of support at crucial times after delivery or what can be interpreted as a silent support of formula in hospitals (formula posters on the walls and in doctor’s offices, free formula giveaways, goody bags with formula logos on them, coupons for formula, etc.), which this new program will help to address.

Yay!

(Other blogs where you can find more thoughts on this subject: Women’s Health News, The Lactivist, banthebags.org, babygooroo, Human Lactation Information, Black Breastfeeding Blog. If you have a blog and have written in favor of this new policy, contact me, and I’ll include a link to your post here.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 9:04 am and is filed under Formula, Breastfeeding, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.