I wrote it;  where do I send it??

Most women have always worked.  Most women have always breastfed for more
than a year.  The apparent incompatibility of these two statements arises
not from some conflict of body and brain, but from a society that devalues
women.

NOW, an organization that should celebrate *all* aspects of our biology,
will find in the new American Academy of Pediatrics breastfeeding policy
support for women at a level this country has never seen.  The new policy
lends additional weight to what has been a little-known US policy for the
past 7 years:

"...all women should be enabled to practise exclusive breastfeeding and all
infants should be fed exclusively on breastmilk from birth to 4-6 months of
age.  Thereafter, children should continue to be breastfed, while receiving
appropriate and adequate complementary foods, for up to two years of age or
beyond."

This statement, known as the Innocenti Declaration, calls on our government
to enact "imaginative legislation protecting the breastfeeding rights of
working women and establish means for its enforcement."  It is our
legislative approach that needs to change, not the AAP policy.

If NOW would throw its weight behind the right of all women to breastfeed
and the right of every child to be breastfed, and with the existing support
of the AAP, the Surgeon General, Healthy People 2000, UNICEF, and the World
Health Organization, then American women might begin to reclaim the
baseline health to which we are entitled, and mothers and babies together
might begin to reclaim one of our most pleasurable human relationships.

Guilt?  Please don't patronize us.  Women are capable of making choices
appropriate to their personal situations.  To insist that we do so without
full information about the effects of our choices is to play the same role
that old-style medicine played in our lives - the role that the new AAP
policy helps to sweep away.  Surely NOW is not going to take up where
paternalistic medicine left off.  Support us as women.  Support our ability
to choose for ourselves.  Support our search for information.  And support
the changes necessary for us reach our full potential in the workplace
without sacrificing our health or our relationship with our children.
Stand up for us.  The AAP has.

Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC, LLLL  Ithaca, NY