Dear Denise,

I liked your comments about making workplaces "baby-friendly" vs. enabling
mothers to stay with their babies.  This topic of breastfeeding, women, and
work is the focus of the Women and Work Task Force at WABA (World Alliance
for Breastfeeding Action), where I have just joined Ines Fernandez of the
Philippines as a co-coordinator.

One of the Task Force's contributions to this discussion was to come up with
a short-term strategy and a long-term strategy.  The long-term strategy is to
encourage development of ways women can be with their babies for the entire
recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding (about 6 months) or for longer
if the mothers want that.  Parental leave such as they have in the Nordic
countries is one way to do this.  Accommodations at the workplace or in a
woman's working conditions that allow her to combine work with both
breastfeeding and mothering would be another way.  These might mean having
the baby with her at work or working at home.

The short-term strategy is a way to assist women with breastfeeding in the
interim, while we wait and work for the long-term solution to become a
reality for more women.  That strategy is to enable women to express milk or
take nursing breaks at work, so they can sustain optimal breastfeeding even
if they can't be with their babies as much as they would like.

Ted Greiner, one of the architects of the two strategies, put it this way:

             Social norms can be changed through conscious struggle. Let us
             put our efforts into mapping out how that struggle should be
             conducted. We will need to work on two fronts at the same
             time.

             1) Fight for the right of working mothers and newborns to
             spend the first few months together, preferably the six month
             recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding.

             2) In the meantime, find ways to help working mothers cope
             with situations in which this right is denied them. But always
             keep in mind the long-term goal.

As I see it, producing babies and breastfeeding them are unique kinds of work
that women do.  A woman who is doing these jobs in addition to working for
pay is doing extra, unrecognized, and under-valued work, and she deserves a
reduction in her "other" job during the period that she is putting in time,
energy, loss of sleep, and mental energy into being pregnant, giving birth,
and breastfeeding.  But this isn't a hobby---it is real work, and she
deserves to be compensated for doing it.  How we can work that out remains to
be seen, but until we do work it out, women won't achieve equality with men.

Chris Mulford
Pennsylvania, USA

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