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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Breastfeeding

To encourage breastfeeding it would be useful if the council provided the resources to be able to do so in public at leisure centres first before providing rooms which send a negative message to women and oblige them to use them! Toilets, breastfeeding room??? UCK!
For example in the Llanishen leisure centre the seats by the pool are bolted to the floor and that makes it impossible to sit there to feed a baby and by the way it males the seating unsuitable for many disabled people and also small children.

Step One
Come on Cardiff Council make seating breast feeding friendly - disabled friendly and childfriendly!!

Step 2 A campaign with pictures of women breast feeding would be positive and normalise the practice

Step 3 A stop to advertising tinned artificial baby milk would be a first step particularly in the hospital.

Questions
Do they still give mothers are given formula samples on their way out the hospital door. Is it conspicuously absent from hospitals, and advertising banned?

Try the internet and look for advice for mums to be and you get cow and gate and milupa offering chat and on line advice - cow and gate say chat to our midwives and online pregnancy forum! What midwives are these - hope they aren't working for NHS!

This should be banned! Perhaps there should be some research done here into marketuing strategies designed to undermine breastfeeding!

In USA
Impeding Breast Feeding: The infant formula industry and its trade association, the International Formula Council (IFC), continue to pursue marketing strategies designed to undermine breastfeeding, even though babies that are not breast fed suffer higher rates of health problems including sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), diabetes, lymphoma, leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, obesity, high cholesterol and asthma. Peggy O'Mara, the editor of Mothering Magazine, has noticed several IFC-affiliated "stealth" websites "that appear to be grassroots advocacy sites, but are actually mouthpieces for the formula industry." The websites, MomsFeedingFreedom.com and Babyfeedingchoice.org, are campaigning against proposed restrictions on the free bags of infant formula being given to new parents by hospitals. BanTheBags, which supports a ban on free samples, observes that the sites "use classic formula company strategies, paying lip service to benefits of breastfeeding even as they promote formula. When breastfeeding is mentioned, it’s a chore and a bother." The formula industry was especially vocal about frank ads being developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to warn about the consequences of not breastfeeding. According to the Washington Post, HHS bowed to industry pressure and toned down the ads so significantly that after they aired, the rate of breastfeeding in the U.S. actually dropped measurably.

Try Association of Breastfeeding Mothers Tel. 08444 122 949
The Breastfeeding Network Tel. 0844 412 4664
La Leche LeagueTel. 0845 120 2918
National Childbirth Trust Tel. 0870 444 8708
The Breastfeeding Network - breastfeeding support in Bengali and Sylhetti Tel. 07944 879 759

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