Many thanks to all who have offered encouragement in regard to my posting of
patents on human milk components.  I think one of the wonderful things about
Lactnet is that we have an enormous smorgasboard of ideas, references, and
beliefs regarding breastfeeding, human milk, medicine, and mothering.  There are
some posts that will interest us, that will outrage us, that make us laugh, and
some that make us cry.  And then there are some we just skip because of lack
of time, disinterest, or disbelief.

There has been a number of people who have asked me what can we do?
Breastfeeding advocacy means that we are competing against multi-national
organizations that have enormous power and lots of money.
We believe we can't compete because we certainly have little power and not
much money.  But the irony is that our competitors have to work pretty darn hard
to maintain this situation and they have to spend enormous amounts of money
to do it.

So should we give up, use their tactics???  No, I don't believe in giving up
and I don't believe in using their tactics.  What I do believe in is that we
seriously devote our time to understanding and promoting the WHO Code,
particularly in the USA.   We make our own organizations accountable--why has the
IBLCE made a  code of ethics tenet in support of intellectual property rights
(patenting be an important ingredient to these rights)?  Donating human milk needs
to be rethought.  Why?  Because we have corporations, institutions, and
researchers harvesting/mining components for use in drugs, infant formula but we
don't have a societal commitment to breastfeeding.
Valerie W. McClain, breastfeeding advocate

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