For nearly two years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spent $2 million on an ad campaign to promote breastfeeding by educating mothers about the risks of not doing so. Those risks were often communicated in provocative ways. One television ad, for example, showed a pregnant African American woman riding a mechanical bull, and then the message appears on the screen, “You wouldn't take risks before your baby is born. Why start after?”
References
1.
OritAvishai. “Managing the Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood”, Qualitative Sociology (2007) 30: 135–152. Challenges the notion that breastfeeding is empowering and pleasurable through interviews with middle class mothers.
2.
LindaM. Blum1999. At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon Press, 1999). Uses in-depth interviews with mothers and analyses of popular advice literature to explore how mothering and breastfeeding vary by race and class.
3.
EirikEvenhouseSiobhanReilly.2005. “Improved Estimates of the Benefits of Breastfeeding Using Sibling Comparisons to Reduce Selection Bias”, Health Sciences Research (2005) 40: 1781–1802. This quantitative analysis of sibling pairs suggests observational studies may have overstated the long-term benefits of breastfeeding.
4.
La LecheLeagueInternational. Breastfeeding Statistics (La Leche League International Center for Breastfeeding Information, 2003). Summary of cross-national breastfeeding initiation and duration rates.
5.
JoanB. Wolf. “Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign”, Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law (2007) 32: 595–636. A forceful critique of the public health campaign to promote breastfeeding, as well as the science behind it.
