MHS:   Source date is:     07-Jun-95 11:06:00 -0300 EDT

======== Original Message ========
Alicia's note about the staff at a San Diego hospital promoting
bfing by hanging pictures of themselves nursing their own babies
is a wonderful idea. Not only is a picture worth a thousand
words, but paraphrasing "putting your body (money) where your
(baby's) mouth is seems appropriate here", hmmmmm? Judy K.
======== Fwd by: Judy Canahuat ========
The originators of this idea, to the best of my knowledge, were at the
Social Security hospital in Tijuana, Mexico.  I saw the pictures there in
1986, when I took my first trip to Wellstart, and thought then that they
were a wonderful morale booster and fostered a sense of solidarity between
staff and patients.  As  some of you probably know, Wellstart is in San
Diego and there has been quite a bit of interaction between Wellstart staff
and the many local hospitals over the course of the last 13 years or so. At
the time, Betty Jones, the nutritionist who was then at Wellstart, had been
working with them for several years and that hospital was doing some really
great things in the pre-Baby Friendly atmosphere.  I first met Betty Jones
in the early 1980s when she came to Honduras with a group of plastic
surgeons from a group called Interplast developed at Stanford Medical
School.  They did reconstructive surgery and Betty tried out the still
somewhat radical idea at that time of having babies nurse within a couple of
hours after the surgery and up to very shortly before.  If my memory serves
me well, Betty published on that experience.  I'm not sure if this is now
standard practice in the US, but at the time (around 15 years ago), only we
"breastfeeding fanatics" brought up this issue.