The Limits of Rights, Choice, and Needs: The Politics of Breastfeeding at the World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO)’s infant feeding guidelines are spelled out clearly on the organization’s website: breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, then introduce complementary foods while continuing to breastfeed for up to two years of age or beyond. And yet, the site notes: “contrary to WHO recommendations, fewer than half of infants under 6 months old are exclusively breastfed.” An explanation is offered: “Inappropriate marketing of breast-milk substitutes continues to undermine efforts to improve breastfeeding rates and duration worldwide.”

How did the WHO arrive at these recommendations, and why is infant formula marketing highlighted as the primary barrier to breastfeeding? My presentation will focus on a pivotal moment in the evolution of WHO policies: the 1979 Joint WHO/UNICEF Meeting on Infant and Young Child Feeding and subsequent development of an International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes, adopted in 1981. It will explore how a variety of different actors shaped these processes: scientists, formula industry leaders, the consumer rights and religious organizations that led the 1970s Nestlé boycott, and breastfeeding groups like La Leche League International. I will focus on the competing understandings of mothers put forward by these actors – as natural breast-feeders led astray by modern society, as independent decision-makers, as victims of formula marketing...etc. – and explore how these understandings were shaped by underlying ideologies of gender, race, class, and nation. Finally, I will argue that the fixation on infant formula marketing –important as it was/is – has deflected attention from more sophisticated feminist analyses of the politics and practice of infant feeding, including some that were produced within the organization but continually sidelined over the years. Reclaiming these analyses will be crucial in developing language and approaches that better reflects the lives and needs of mothers and other infant care-givers in the 21^st century.