Women breastfeed their babies during a public event to promote the benefits of breastfeeding, at a… [+] park in Bogota on November 3, 2017. Hundreds of mothers simultaneously breastfed their babies during a gathering held to promote breastfeeding as part of infants' right to a healthy diet. (RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty Images)
When the U.S. pushed to weaken language supporting breastfeeding in a WHO resolution at the World Health Assembly recently, the Trump administration prioritized the U.S. dairy industry and the $70 billion baby food industry over babies’ health, according to Alison Stuebe, M.D., M.Sc.f, a maternal-fetal medicine physician and president-elect of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine.
“What the WHO is trying to do is help women achieve their own breastfeeding goals, and unfortunately those goals conflict with goals of the dairy industry,” Stuebe said. “The U.S. decided that the dairy industry is more important than moms and babies.”
The resolution Stuebe is referring to should have been noncontroversial, as journalist Amruta Byatnal first reported in News Deeply last month. It updated the evidence on supporting breastfeeding, which is particularly useful for low-income nations without the resources to conduct their own research on breastfeeding support. The resolution included guidance on the WHO’s International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, which outlines what kind of marketing is and is not acceptable from formula companies.
And that’s what the U.S.—home to most of those companies—had a problem with. The U.S. first tried to block the resolution and then pushed hard for an alternative that removed language related to restricting aggressive marketing by formula companies. In fact, as Vox reported, the U.S. threatened Ecuador, one of the resolution’s sponsors, with trade retaliation and withdrawal of military aid if Ecuador didn’t backtrack.
The resolution eventually passed, but only after substantial changes diluting the language about formula marketing (and after Russia supported it). (Here’s the original draft, the U.S. proposed alternative wording, and the final resolution that passed.)
The reason for U.S. opposition, according to the Department of Health and Human Services in the New York Times, was that “The resolution as originally drafted placed unnecessary hurdles for mothers seeking to provide nutrition to their children.”*
When I reached out to the department, HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley told me the following:
Recent reporting attempts to portray the U.S. position at the recent World Health Assembly as ‘anti-breastfeeding’ are patently false. The United States has a long history of supporting mothers and breastfeeding around the world and is the largest bilateral donor of such foreign assistance programs. The issues being debated were not about whether one supports breastfeeding. The United States was fighting to protect women’s abilities to make the best choices for the nutrition of their babies. Many women are not able to breastfeed for a variety of reasons, these women should not be stigmatized; they should be equally supported with information and access to alternatives for the health of themselves and their babies.
