I stand corrected on the corporate status of Evenflo.  Have spent the day
sitting at police station waiting to renew my visa and recovering from
working two nights this weekend so have kind of fallen out of
the conversation.  Also, I understand and empathize with the reactions
of those who worked to bring Evenflo into compliance and who have been
affected by their change of tack.  I didn't want to imply that my jaundiced
view of business tactics should be everyone's view - it's just mine, part of
who I am, for better or for worse.

I wasn't born yesterday, I wasn't even born in this millennium, and I don't
have a lot of illusions about the need for alliances of various kinds.  From
within the US, especially if you have never lived anywhere else, such as a
country with paid maternity leave for everyone, it is hard to believe that
arrangement could ever become reality there.  (Even Portugal has maternity
leave and their national debt per capita is at the same level as the US,
according to a news item my husband saw yesterday.  Very few countries in
the world don't have maternity leave.)   There is no getting around the fact
that pump companies benefit from breastfeeding mothers and babies being kept
apart.  If IBCLCs and anyone else working for breastfeeding continue to be
financially dependent on pump companies, they will not be able to advocate
as strongly for the right of mothers and babies to be together for the early
months of breastfeeding.

Breast pumps have a place in helping mothers in certain situations ensure
that their babies can get their milk.  But in places with no pumps, or where
women can not safely use a pump because they lack the facilities to clean
them, there is a completely different imperative to focus on the
breastfeeding, the condition of mother and baby engaging in a common
activity that is something very different to removing milk from the breast
and serving it to the child.  In places where pumps are part of every
family's essential gear for parenthood, lactation is in danger of
being reduced to a matter of a nutritious liquid produced in one place and
consumed in another.  I think I would feel less antagonized by pump
marketing if it were focused on the actual technical specs of the pumps, how
easy they are to clean and assemble, how many gallons they can go before you
need to do maintenance on them, and in which situations mothers must use
some other means than a baby to remove milk from their breasts.  I am not
mainly concerned with how quiet the motor is or how fashionable the tote bag
is so your colleague in the next cublicle doesn't have to know you are
expressing and storing milk for your absent baby.  For all I know there are
cooler bags so you can store your milk without anyone else in your workplace
saying ''eewwwww' if they find a bottle in the staff fridge when they get
their lunch.

It should be clear from many of my past posts to Lactnet and from this that
I am not criticizing mothers who pump milk for the babies who are unable to
breastfeed, either due to problems or because they are somewhere else.  I
have nothing but admiration for the work they do to keep their babies fed on
their milk and I hope I would have had the same degree of dedication if I
had needed to rely on expression and alternative feeding methods.  But I
despair when people whose work involves helping mothers start
breastfeeding, the group who ought to know what is needed to enable more
mothers and babies to experience more than a symbolic breastfeeding
relationship, won't allow themselves to imagine what things might look like
if we dared to work for universal maternity leave for ALL mothers, long
enough to establish a sustainable breastfeeding relationship and
breastfeeding leave for those who chose to make use of it.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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