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The Politics of Breastfeeding: when breasts are bad for business (paperback)

Product description

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.

Review taken from MIDIRS publications

The first edition of The Politics of Breastfeeding was published in 1988 and was an inspiration to midwives at that time. The second edition was published in 1993, and so this edition is very welcome following a gap of 16 years.

Gabrielle Palmer has made a profound contribution to understanding why breastfeeding is not the cultural norm for all women in every society throughout the world. As she has said in each edition in the preface: ‘there should be no need for this book…I hope...that this book will become merely the record of a tragically foolish phase in human history’ (2009:vii – viii).

In her books, Gabrielle Palmer graphically delineates the roles of sexual politics and global capitalism and how these power structures have conspired to appropriate breasts and breast feeding from women. She relates this clearly and dramatically by explaining how this has contributed to the suffering, illness and death of millions of babies and often their mothers too. She uses various visual images which are shocking and disturbing, for example on page 27, a Cow & Gate leaflet exploiting experiences of sore nipples.

What distinguishes this edition from previous publications is that there have been significant changes that have occurred over the previous 16 years. For example, there has been new knowledge developed concerning relationships between breastfeeding and long term health outcomes of diabetes and hypertension and reduction of breast cancer amongst women who breastfeed. With this new knowledge, baby food and bottle companies have become more sophisticated in their marketing strategies designed to influence the media and Government policies.

Sadly, there has been the advent of HIV and, Gabrielle discusses the various problems related to HIV transmission from mother to child and how these affect breastfeeding in industrialised and developing countries. She takes the reader through the development of research and knowledge over the last 20 years or so, painstakingly describing what a muddle it all was and finally emerging with a discussion on the merits of exclusive breastfeeding in developing countries.

Another major development since the last edition in 1993 has been the ecological crisis affecting our planet. Gabrielle has developed this in this edition and, again, takes us through a brief recent history of how she sees exclusively breastfeeding women contributing positively to the ‘carbon footprint’ of the human population. She describes what has been called human ‘progress’ and equates poor breastfeeding rates with deforestation, climate change and destruction of all that nature has provided us. It makes for salutary reading but it is vital for the human population to understand fully how we are destroying our future.

Gabrielle Palmer’s style of writing is engaging and emotive. It draws the reader into the content and both fascinates and shocks. I cannot recommend this book more highly, not only for healthcare professionals related to childbirth, but for everyone in society because the issue of breastfeeding affects the whole of humanity.

Reviewed by Caroline Squire, senior lecturer midwifery, Thames Valley University in September 2010, Volume 1, Number 3 Edition of Essentially MIDIRS.