From today's Washington Post, Business Section
<http://www.washingtonpost.com>

Kathy Koch, LLL Leader
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Alexandria, VA
*************
Companies Find a Cost-Saving Formula for Working Moms

By Kirstin Downey Grimsley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 1, 1997; Page C01
The Washington Post

 New mothers and advocates of breast-feeding are finding support from an
unusual corner these days: corporate boardrooms.

Across the country, companies recognized for their progressive employee
benefits are adding lactation programs to their rosters. This week, for
example, Cigna Corp., a Philadelphia-based insurance giant, will
introduce a lactation program at its offices in Columbia as part of its
plan to take the program nationwide.

Cigna will provide new mothers with visits from lactation experts,
private rooms for expressing milk at work, use of free hospital-grade
breast pumps, and breast- feeding kits andliterature. It also will
subsidize the cost of breast pumps for employees who want to rent or buy
them.

Cigna, whose work force is 70 percent female, joins other firms with
Washington area offices that are taking steps to encourage their working
mothers to breast-feed their infants.  They include Fannie Mae and the
American Academy of Pediatrics, both in the District; the Federal Home
Loan
Mortgage Corp. of McLean; Rockville-based Life Technologies Inc.; and
the regional employees of NCR Corp. Government agencies that provide
some lactation assistance include the National Security Agency, the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.

The employers hope that these actions will help reduce absenteeism among
new mothers -- both in sick days for them and their infants -- and keep
working mothers on the payroll.

"It's a dollars-and-cents issue for companies trying to lower their
health care costs," said lactation consultant Jane Balkam, owner of
Bethesda-based Babies 'n' Business, which works with seven area
companies and their employees.

Maureen Neisees, 32, a physician recruiter for Cigna's managed-care
system in Columbia, who has an 8-week-old son, Christoph, said she was
"thrilled" to learn of the program. She hopes it will help ease her
transition to work from maternity leave, when it ends in August.

"Without the program, I would have started supplementing with formula,
and I think there would have been guilt there because I didn't give him
breast milk only," she said.

According to a 1995 study of women workers and their newborns by the
University of California at Los Angeles, breast-fed infants were 36
percent healthier than formula-fed babies, which reduced the mother's
absenteeism by 27 percent. The study found that mothers of formula-fed
babies missed a day's work because their babies were ill three times
more often than breast-fed babies.

"There's a soft-and-fuzzy benefit, too," said Jim Hughes, a sales
representative for Sanvita, a subsidiary of Illinois-based breast-pump
manufacturer Medela Inc. that markets breast pumps and lactation
consultation to corporate human resources departments. "You are viewed
as a family-friendly company."

Cathy Hope of Arlington, a manager in Fannie Mae's government and
industry relations department, said the company's lactation program made
a big difference for her and her son, Evan, now 18 months.

"Without the support Fannie Mae gave me, I wouldn't have been able to
juggle breast-feeding my son for the first six months," said Hope, 34,
who returned to work after a three-month maternity leave early last
year.

But the topic still raises many a quizzical eyebrow, particularly among
older male executives. Hughes recalled that when he first began making
sales calls to human resources executives three years ago to tout the
benefits of corporate-sponsored breast-feeding programs, his queries
about lactation services
drew a puzzled response.

" `Lactation service?' they would say. `No, we already have arelocation
service,' " Hughes recalled with a laugh.

The executives' surprise is not surprising: Nationally, only 10 percent
of employed mothers continue to breast-feed their children for the first
six months of their lives, as pediatricians recommend.