Hello, world!  It’s been a while since my last blog post, but that’s because I do most of my interaction via Facebook.  Today, though, I felt it necessary to blog because there is a very special lady who I want to write about.  This lady is Emma Kwasnica.  I know, I know, I’ve talked about her before.  But she’s worth talking about again.  Let me tell you why.

Emma Kwasnica is making the world a better place.  Each and every day, she helps families around the world get breastmilk for their babies.  She does it all for FREE.  She does it out of the goodness of her heart, her sincere love of babies, mothers, families… humanity.  She created the wildly successful Human Milk 4 Human Babies GLOBAL network to help connect needy families with families that can spare the breastmilk.  She enables and inspires community-building, healthier families, more informed birth choices, and yes, even world peace.  How many people do you know who do that?  She is the Earth-Mother-rock star you’ve never heard of (well, maybe you have ;)), the Mother Theresa of the mommy world.  Remarkably, she’s also really very humble about it.

Emma Kwasnica has rightfully been “mominated” for a babble.com prize.   Please, if you haven’t already, vote for her.  I guarantee you she will do good things if she wins, because she will do good things even if she doesn’t win.  Whatever she does will benefit humankind as a whole.  Even if she decides to spend all the prize money on herself, she would still deserve it.  But she won’t, because she’s Emma, and she basically dedicates her life to helping others.

To vote, please click on this babble.com link.  Then click on “like” where it says “click ‘like’ to vote for me” to vote for Emma.  It’s very simple.  You need to be logged into your Facebook account in order to do so.  Please do it and please share the link with all your friends so that they can vote for her, too.

If you are reading this, Emma, please know I fervently hope you win.  You are beautiful inside and out, and an inspiration to (surely) thousands of women around the world.  Thank you for all you do!

A city just outside the metro Atlanta area called Forest Park has recently made it illegal for children over 2 to nurse in public.  You heard that correctly.  Illegal.  As in, can be fined for it.  Or possibly even put in jail.  For nursing.  A toddler.

There is no shame — or at least, there shouldn’t be any shame — in breastfeeding a baby or a toddler in public.  This is what a toddler nursing looks like:

  And this:

And this:

It should be obvious to everyone that a law like this one is hostile not only to those who breastfeed a toddler of 2+ years, but to every breastfeeding dyad.  Why?  Well, if a mother is breastfeeding a baby of any age (even younger than 2) in a place where a law like this is in effect, this means that legally, she can be harassed for breastfeeding her baby.  She may not be fined or jailed for breastfeeding a baby that is under 2, but she could be questioned, pestered, bullied, and shamed into early weaning because of it.  A law like this could make it a cinch to drive the already floundering breastfeeding rates in the United States all the way to the floor.  It needs to be NIPped in the bud. (Pun totally intended.)

A breastfeeding-supportive father, This Daddy, called John Parker, City Manager of Forest Park, GA, and one of the creators of this asinine law.  Here’s This Daddy’s entry about the phone call, which reveals a lot about John Parker’s priorities.

There will be a nurse-in to peacefully protest this harmful law.  KellyMom on Facebook has all the details.  If you live in Georgia or in the surrounding area, please try to make it there, Monday, May 23rd at 10:00 A.M. Here’s the address:

745 Forest Pkwy, Forest Park, GA 30297

If you can’t attend the nurse-in physically, at least write Forest Park and tell them you think this law is harmful for babies and their mothers, and why.  Use this contact form.  If you prefer to use your email or snail mail a letter, or if you’d like to call or fax John Parker’s office, here is the information necessary to do so:

Office of the City Manager
745 Forest Parkway
Forest Park, Ga. 30297
Phone: 404-366-4720
Fax: 404-608-2343 

John Parker, City Manager
Email address - jparker@forestparkga.org

Angela Redding, Management Analyst
Email address - aredding@forestparkga.org

Jan Young, Executive Assistant
Email address - jyoung@forestparkga.org

Last but not least, there is a petition you can sign called “Repeal restrictions on breastfeeding” to help with this cause.  Please do.

Comment on my Facebook page, please:

I was shocked recently when I read about a terrible shipping fiasco with UPS.  A shipment from a breastmilk donor was sent out via UPS and paid for by the recipient, but the recipient never received it.  Furthermore, all UPS told the recipient was that the package was “damaged in transit” and “discarded.”

If you have Facebook, you can see for yourself the thread here on the Washington HM4HB page.  The donor shipped over FIVE HUNDRED OUNCES of breastmilk from Washington State to Virginia.   All 500 oz were “lost” by UPS.  That’s almost exactly four gallons of human milk.

Picture four of these (containing breastmilk, not cows’ milk):

Fifteen liters (15 L).  I’m writing the different conversions to help you wrap your head around just how much milk was discarded by the shipping company like so much trash.  These five hundred ounces of milk represent HOURS of this donor’s, this woman’s, life.  Hours of effort, love, and care that she painstakingly packaged to gift to a baby and mama in need living across the country.  She donated the milk in good faith and probably never imagined UPS would treat her efforts with such disregard.  Now, because of UPS’s unbelievable irresponsibility, a donor’s efforts have been literally dumped who knows where and a recipient family has been left without human milk.

I wonder how UPS will handle this.  Will they recompense the donor for her milk?  Will they recompense the recipient at least for the money she paid to have her package shipped?  I cannot imagine the agony both mothers must be experiencing right now.  I don’t understand why UPS discarded the package instead of at least showing it to the recipient.  Why did they keep it?  What do they have to hide?

I am sharing this story so that UPS will wake up, and so that if they choose not to respect these two families and milksharing efforts, the milksharing world will take notice and recommend that UPS not be used for any shipping (not just shipping that involves breastmilk).  What do you think?  Please comment on my Facebook page.

In January 2010, Emma Kwasnica, of Montréal, started using Facebook to help
families who needed breastmilk for their babies by connecting them with other
families with breastmilk to spare.  Emma was making connections all over the world, and she soon found that managing several different requests all over the world, and their corresponding donations, was becoming overwhelming.  She decided to organize her efforts by country for those countries outside Canada and the U.S., and by province/state for Canada and the U.S., respectively.  She found a kindred spirit in Shell Walker, an Arizona midwife who was doing something similar on a more local level.  Shell had created her page in July of 2010 for a close, tight-knit community in Phoenix, AZ.  Shell had named her local network “Eats on Feets.”  They decided to join forces in October 2010 and call the worldwide network Emma created “Eats on Feets GLOBAL.”

All went well for a few months, with “milky matches” (as the milksharing connections are known) being made worldwide.  The media attention was amazing, and “Eats on Feets GLOBAL” was becoming a household name in breastfeeding advocacy circles.  Human milk that would have otherwise gone to waste was getting to human babies that needed it.  “Eats on Feets GLOBAL” was working.

Then, toward the end of February 2011, something happened.  There was an uncompromising change of opinion in how the network should be managed. Shell filed an application to trademark the name “Eats on Feets,” and started dictating “terms of use” for the volunteer administrators of the pages that weren’t in keeping with the spirit of the network. The growing pains became too much, and the name of Emma’s original vision of a worldwide, milksharing network was changed to protect the network from becoming something different from its original intention.  The new name is Human Milk 4 Human Babies.  Its pages on Facebook are run by the same hardworking administrators that ran the “Eats on Feets GLOBAL” pages.  There are new pages being added every day, in fact, so the network is still growing to accommodate needs in different regions.

Please visit the Human Milk 4 Human Babies (HM4HB) website to find your local page.  If you have breastmilk to spare or if you have a baby in need, please “Like” your region’s page and make an offer or a request.  It is YOU that make this network possible. If you do not find your region’s HM4HB page, consider starting your own HM4HB page on Facebook.  Contact Emma Kwasnica for details.

If you know someone who could benefit from this network and would like to participate in HM4HB (as a donor or recipient), but that person does not have a Facebook account, please post on their behalf.

Human Milk 4 Human Babies is called “Lactancia Solidaria” in Spanish.  You can find Lactancia Solidaria on Facebook for Puerto Rico, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela.

Because of the recent disaster in Japan, I am sharing the link for the HM4HB Japan page.  If you are in Japan, and can, please help.

Hello everyone.  If you’re logged onto Facebook, you can “like” this page by clicking the “like” button to the right underneath where it says “about.”  You can also friend Mama Bear (me!) by searching for “MamaBear Lactating.”  I will try to do a better job of updating the Facebook page than this blog, as it is much easier to keep up with.  I hope to see you there!

I have not posted anything on this blog for a very long time.  I don’t even want to think about how long.  However, what I am posting today cannot wait.  It’s too important.  There is a new way to share breast milk with those in need, in addition to MilkShare, and it’s also directly mother-to-mother.  It’s called Eats on Feets (http://www.eatsonfeets.org/), and it’s fabulous!  There is no charge for this service, and since it’s connected through Facebook, it’s almost immediate for both potential donors and their recipients.  Please, if you have extra human milk to give, check out Eats on Feets.  There is one for every state (sometimes more than one for each state), and it’s available in several countries as well!  I cannot say enough good things about Eats on Feets!  It is seriously making the world a better place.

I visited Mothering.com today (Hi, Kimber! :)) and discovered a gem of a video entitled “Substitute Abuse” from South Africa. Kudos to the iThemba Lethu Milk Bank (founded by Anna Coutsoudis and run by Penny Reimers) for putting their energy to good use!

This humorous take on breastfeeding education has an audio track that doesn’t aways synchronize with the video, but it is worth watching and listening to the message and intent behind it. Beautifully done. Thanks for uploading it to YouTube, pokenny.

I just noticed that The Lactivist’s Tuesday, June 05, 2007 post on The International Breast Milk Project accurately reflects the current reality with the IBMP and Prolacta now (Hm. I recently noticed Prolacta.com looks different — different colors and different pictures and different overall format — kind of annoying since before it was more technical and straightforward — though woefully incomplete — and now it’s more “soft” and “vague” and “wishy-washy” — and still missing a lot of really important information. When someone’s primary motivation is making a profit, you gotta wonder about these things…).

I want to thank her (The Lactivist) personally for updating her original, breakthrough thoughts on the IBMP with this thorough post: Thank you, Jennifer.

Please read her post. She has captured a lot of the concerns I’ve been writing about with regard to Prolacta and the IBMP. As a recipient (Jennifer is writing from the perspective of a donor), I can agree with most of what she has to say. I am not a capitalist at heart. I have learned to work within The Patriarchal Machine, and I do it really well, but I really do believe in a true democracy, where money doesn’t really matter (and everyone is equally important). But that information is not really that relevant to this particular post of mine. It’s really important that y’all read what Jennifer has to say regarding “What This News Doesn’t Change” and “Where Does This Leave You?” if you’re thinking of formal milk donation (unlike informal milk donation — like MilkShare, which for me as a mother who has desperately needed breastmilk for my child on numerous occasions and gotten it through there, has been a Godsend).

Please read her post. It’s very important. Don’t miss it.

Thank you. The International Breastfeeding Symbol Website and Blog thanks you.

December is traditionally a very holiday-heavy month. From Christmas to Hanukkah to the revival holiday Kwanzaa to the Winter Solstice (the astronomical observation which became the inspiration for the original pagan celebrations that inspired what we now call Christmas) and Newton’s birthday (December 25 or January 4, depending on who you ask), no matter who you are, if you live in a Western-influenced society, you’re probably celebrating something this month. And if you’re celebrating a holiday, chances are, you’re probably buying a gift or two (or several dozen) for family and friends.

I discovered this mini-documentary recently, entitled “The Story of Stuff,” made by a woman named Annie Leonard, and I feel compelled to share it with as many people as possible. I think it’s very appropriate for the consumer-driven holiday season. It has inspired me to make all my gifts be as homemade and thoughtful as possible this year. Maybe I should just drop the idea of a having a thing represent the value of the relationships I have with others. Perhaps I should just focus on making time for the people in my life, instead of finding a thing for them. Or, if I feel compelled to hand a real, tangible object to someone as a token of my affection for them, perhaps I should make sure it’s at least going to be something they can appreciate for many years, rather than chuck in the garbage within a month of receiving it. It’s hard to articulate into words what I’m trying to convey, but I’m just really tired of the hectic consumer December holiday season, with all the expectations and guilt involved in making sure everyone has a gift, even if it’s a completely useless one. It focuses on all the wrong things: the pretense, the petty superficialities, the ego… And it generates SO much waste and environmental damage in the process.

Anyway, I know this post isn’t about breastfeeding, but the video called “The Story of Stuff” is very important and contains a tiny bit of breastfeeding information in it that is important to know. It mentions that breastfeeding is “the most fundamental human act of nurturing” and that it “should be sacred and safe.” I totally agree, of course. What the movie doesn’t show (but can be easily inferred from its content) is that formula, since it is a part of this artificial system known as the materials economy, also causes harm and exploitation (the factory-farmed dairy cows and the people who tend them are exploited, for example, and the metal used for the cans themselves had to be mined from some exploded mountain somewhere), and that we shouldn’t be surprised to find toxic chemicals in our formula because of the whole “toxics in, toxics out” phenomenon of manufacture.

For example, even though nobody thought of it for years, finally someone figured out that the linings inside most cans (including all cans used for infant formula) contain bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic plastic. Contrast the exposure of a human baby to BPA amounts from canned formula compared to the amounts typically found in breastmilk and there’s NO QUESTION that there are much higher toxicity levels in infant formula — in fact, if you compare all commercially prepared foods, even those for adults and canned infant formula, to human breastmilk, the one food that contains the least amount of BPA toxicity is human breastmilk. This fact may not be apparent from the film, and the mention that “the highest level of many toxic contaminants,” might sound like it’s the opposite of what I just wrote, but it really isn’t (not for bisphenol-A, anyway). The point of Annie Leonard mentioning the breastmilk is to point out that this materials economy violates the basic human right to have clean, pure human milk free from contaminants, not that breastmilk is any more poisonous than the rest of our intoxicated foodstuffs. Infant formula, as it turns out, is way more damaging to infant and mother health than breastfeeding, in the vast majority of circumstances, whether the infant formula is canned or powdered (as one of my previous posts pointed out, powdered infant formula has many health risks and disadvantages).

Here’s a teaser video of “The Story of Stuff.” If you want to see the whole video, you’ve got to go to www.storyofstuff.com. Once there, it will play automatically in the top half of your screen. Enjoy it. If I don’t write again this month, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, Happy Newton’s Birthday, Joyous Winter Solstice and Happy all other December holidays you might celebrate (whatever they may be)!

Annie Leonard: Brava! …For putting so much energy into making your project happen. It’s turned out great so far! Hopefully we can all come up with real solutions that honor and respect the environment instead of burning through it and shitting where we eat (so to speak). I hope many people see your work. It’s a giant step in the right direction.

When I was an adolescent, the country I was living in got caught up in a war situation, to put it mildly. Without revealing too much of myself I’ll say that my adolescence was not spent in the United States.

During the occupation the country I was living in experienced, which resulted in thousands of casualties, most of them innocent civilians caught in crossfires (as is the case with most, if not all, wars), the country’s economy shut down for a few months. Most grocery stores closed, and the tiny corner shops with food that had enough unlooted merchandise to sell would sometimes open, but only sporadically, and with very limited, mostly canned, products. Most supplies didn’t get to most places, so most places couldn’t open for business (not to mention most of the goods had long been ransacked from most stores during that time).

As a consequence of this, the United States military (which was there, and played an active role in the occupation) would issue to the general civilian population (of which my family and I were a part) MREs. What are MREs, you say? MREs are “Meals, Ready to Eat.” They are a food source, issued by the United States Armed Forces, that is ration-quality. At the time, my family, though thankfully not poor, was having considerable trouble finding places that sold food. So the free MRE packages, which consisted of food and other items hermetically sealed in brown plastic with no-nonsense black lettering describing the contents inside, came in pretty handy. We were grateful for them. Now I know in the military (and from talking to American military men and women who had to subsist on MREs), MREs are not popular. They are ration food, after all… Meant to be used in emergency situations, like wars (which should be rare, but sadly, are not).

My family and I ate the MREs; like I said, we were grateful to have them. They kept us from starving for a few days, weeks, however long it was that we ate them… But we also recognized that we could not subsist on them forever (they are not recommended for use beyond 21 consecutive days, probably because of the high sodium and other health reasons). Once the food supplies started coming back into our city, we were able to buy real food again, and we stopped eating the MREs. The ones that were left in our home became novelties (unopened and uneaten novelties, which we passed on to other people who needed them more than we did) after the real, fresh food started to come in.

I think of infant formula as MREs for babies. Both MREs and infant formula have most of the necessary nutrients, the baseline needed for survival, but they are not meant to be used exclusively when a better option is available (which in most normal situations, a better alternative usually is). The thing is, baby formula is a ration-quality product intended for special circumstances (mainly, the inability to breastfeed or pump). People were not meant to subsist on MREs for extended periods of time, not unless there is no other recourse (but if you had to subsist on MREs for a year or two, it probably wouldn’t kill you — you would likely survive). The same can easily be said for formula: babies were not meant (biologically) to subsist entirely on infant formula for extended periods of time.

Since it’s clear to me that infant formula is substandard infant nutrition (compared with the biological norm, breastmilk), and since it’s also pretty clear to me that way too many people in power (doctors, nurses, hospital administrators and personnel, etc.) seem to be confused about this, because they aren’t assisting new mothers with breastfeeding the way they should be upon the birth of their babies, and too many of them, furthermore, PUSH the use of infant formula inappropriately, I thought I’d start to make things a bit more truthful with a proper label.

Here it is:

Compare it to a can of formula anyone could buy in any supermarket in the United States:

The difference in visual information is huge.

Here are some caveats about my label: The label I created does not contain any nutritional information. I probably should have put that on there, but since I’m not actually selling formula, I don’t have to. I was going to give away some extra cans of formula to a shelter here, but I didn’t feel good about leaving the labels intact with all that formula marketing on them. I also didn’t feel good about ripping the labels off because then people wouldn’t know what was in the cans and might throw them away. I couldn’t bear to think of that waste, so instead, I created an alternative label that wouldn’t offend me as much. I simply designed it, printed it out, and pasted it on top of the existing label. That way, if anyone cares to look, they can still find the other one underneath, but they will first have to have read a differing point of view. I took a few artistic liberties with the part that says “Price,” where I said that it was free but available by prescription only. I got that idea from one of the commenters on this blog. The label I have on my download page for anyone to download is slightly different from the one pictured here because the final version has the volume information on it just under where it says “Cows’ Milk-Based.”

Anyway, I thought some of you might want to have this label as an option, so that you could, whenever Freecycling or donating excess cans of ready-to-feed formula to people who might need them, print some truthful labels out and paste them (or tape them, whatever) onto existing formula cans. But please be sure the information is accurate. Most routine formulas are 20 kCal/fl oz and cows’ milk based, so if you’re giving away soy formula or formula that is made with a different formulation, please do NOT use my downloadable label. Feel free to design your own alternative, truthful formula label, and please tell me about it so that I may link to your site and have others see your awesome ideas. Keep in mind that whatever label you create needs to mention that the biological norm is breastfeeding, and that formula is an MRE for babies, not an ideal food for long-term, exclusive use.

Also, I want to say that I welcome constructive criticism of any of the content on this label. If you feel that something on it isn’t accurate enough or may be portraying infant formula or artificial baby milks in too favorable of a light, I need to know that so that I can alter it, or at the very least draw attention to that so that others will be aware of this. Thanks.

Here’s the label itself, which you can download off the download page here at breastfeedingsymbol.org: