Forgive me if I am misinterpreting this, but it is my impression that Jane feels that IBCLCs or at least those of us who are on Lactnet have damaged the economic potential of Medela and Prolacta.  I have also heard from someone who believes  that IBCLCs are responsible for women in the US who wean prematurely.  In some ways, both of these claims suffer from the same flaws in rationale.  It immediately brings me back to a talk by Richard Mannoff many many years ago.

I was single then.  I think James Grant may still have been at UNICEF and they had the GOBI-FF plan.  UNICEF had a long list of tasks for women and I'm just remembering some of them:

1) Take your baby for regular weight checks
2) Immunize your baby
3) Breastfeed your baby frequently
4) Breastfeed your baby more frequently if your baby was sick
5) Give your baby oral rehydration solution if your baby has diarrhea
6) Offer clean solids to your baby when your baby was around six months
7) By 12 months offer 5 meals a day to your baby

In order to do these tasks women needed to walk to the clinics which could involve walking 10-12 miles in the hot sun, mixing up the ORS with clean water which involved collecting the water from a well which might be a long walk and then boiling the water which also would involve collecting firewood which could also be a long walk.  In the meantime, the water needed to be collected for the rest of the family, food needed to be prepared for the rest of the family, vegetables might need to be tended, clothes would have to be washed by scrubbing them over rocks, millet might need to be pounded (with a big heavy mortar and pestel - which I've done and it really is as hard a workout as I get from the pushups I do in Martial Arts) etc.  There are many more tasks involved.  And if you are giving your baby 5 meals a day, keep in mind that many women don't have refrigerators.

By the time he was done with his list of things women had to do, even those of us who had no children really understood how challenging this would be.  His point was that the focus should not just be on the women themselves, but on the family, and community and governmental systems that supported her.

Now, I find it puzzling when there are only 11,000 lactation consultants worldwide, how we can be blamed for destroying a market, particularly when those who have complained about bad advertising are only a tiny proportion of those 11,000.  The budgets of these companies are far greater than the budget of any one of the 11,000 lactation consultants and really even if we all banded together I doubt we could destroy their market anyway.  I do NOT believe that complaining about MISLEADING ADVERTISING is the equivalent of destroying a market.  I think it is essential to creating ACCOUNTABILITY.  Even then, I don't think we are powerful enough to stem the tide of MISLEADING ADVERTISING>

Ditto for destroying a woman's ability to continue to breastfeed.  We are a fledgling profession.  There are many things we can do to improve and there are things we have done wrong that may have made it more challenging for some women.  Nevertheless, we are not setting the hospital policies in the past (which if you read Love at Goon Park are rooting in the discovery of germ theory and the fears that some male psychologists had about the dangers of Mother Love) that are hard to change, we are not employers who are forcing women back to work far too soon, and we are not policy makers who think that allowing women to take reasonable leave is going to destroy the economy.  There are far bigger factors that are making it challenging for women to continue to breastfeed than the mistakes we may have made as we are discovering how best to serve women.

Sincerely,

Susan E. Burger, MHS, PhD, IBCLC

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