Why the Formula Companies Need Women of Color - in the U.S. and globally
My daughter was in the 0.05 percentile of babies’ birth weight for much of the first year of her life.
She looked perfect to me the day I welcomed her to this world: tiny toes that begged to be kissed, a heartstoppingly beautiful pouty mouth and a head full of spiky black hair. She even had a perfectly respectable birthweight at over 7 pounds. But to the medical profession, she rapidly became a problem: she just wasn’t gaining weight fast enough to keep up with their charts. I took their concerns seriously. I breastfed her on demand–sometimes when she was having a growth spurt it felt like I was glued to my rocker and boppy pillow. I attended my local breastfeeding support group religiously, weighed her almost obsessively and tried all their techniques. But she remained stubbornly a little 0.05 percentile baby, who often choked and cried when I tried to nurse her.
My daughter was in the 0.05 percentile of babies’ birth weight for much of the first year of her life. She looked perfect to me the day I welcomed her to this world: tiny toes that begged to be kissed, a heartstoppingly beautiful pouty mouth and a head full of spiky black hair. She even had a perfectly respectable birthweight at over 7 pounds. But to the medical profession, she rapidly became a problem: she just wasn’t gaining weight fast enough to keep up with their charts. I took their concerns seriously. I breastfed her on demand–sometimes when she was having a growth spurt it felt like I was glued to my rocker and boppy pillow. I attended my local breastfeeding support group religiously, weighed her almost obsessively and tried all their techniques. But she remained stubbornly a little 0.05 percentile baby, who often choked and cried when I tried to nurse her.
Similac Commercial The Mother ‘Hood, Crunchy granola breastfeeding police are depicted as having time to nurse their infants .
Fighting back means taking a holistic view that understands the global politics and racial/imperial history of the formula-industrial complex. It means fighting for parent-friendly policies, like extending maternity leave and flexible work arrangements, pushing hospitals and WICs not to routinely distribute formula for newborns and demanding more Baby Friendly hospitals in our neighborhoods. It requires a culturally-sensitive approach that does not shame black women in the U.S. for our higher use of breastmilk substitutes or stigmatize our communities for the racial trauma that continues to be associated with the act of nursing.
The birth justice community has a lot to fight for within the borders of the U.S.. But the struggle to reclaim breastfeeding and turn around black infant mortality rates is one that we won’t win on our own. If we are to challenge Big Formula we will need to develop transnational solidarities with women in Africa, Latin America and beyond. Let’s start with demanding that the U.S. government adopt the WHO’s International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes and end the practice of bullying countries that are standing up to the formula-industrial complex.
Chinyere Oparah is co-founder of Black Women Birthing Justice, and co-author of Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth, a seminal text that puts black women at the center of debates about the crisis in maternal health care. She is lead author of Battling Over Birth which powerfully reveals black women’s experiences of coercion, mistreatment and empowerment during pregnancy, labor and the first six weeks. Chinyere received the Maternal-Child Health Champion Award Visionary of the Year award for this groundbreaking work. Chinyere is Provost and Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College, Oakland, Calif.
To learn more about the barriers to breastfeeding faced by black women and strategies to address them, see Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health-Crisis.