wrong target for breastfeeding ads

I haven’t seen the ads this story refers to, but apparently, a new government ad campaign is aggressively promoting breastfeeding for babies, and mothers who don’t breastfeed are offended. I am a huge proponent of breastfeeding, so you might think that I’d be 100% behind the ad campaign. But I can’t help thinking that this campaign is targeting the wrong people. According to the article, “The latest government figures show more than 70 percent of moms try breastfeeding when their babies are born, but that six months later, only 36 percent are still breastfeeding. One reason, doctors say, is that more than 60 percent of mothers go back to work.” So the number of breastfeeding mothers goes down by almost half when the mothers go back to work. Hmmmm. . . .

If the U.S. wants to increase the number of babies that are breastfed or increase the length of time that babies are breastfed, promoting breastfeeding to new mothers is only one piece of the puzzle. The other, much more important piece, I would argue, is encouraging employers to accommodate breastfeeding employees. Most mothers do go back to work before their babies are a year old and once a breastfeeding mother goes back to work, she needs to either figure out a way to pump milk regularly (every 3 hours—I’m not kidding, either. If I ever tried to go 3 ½ hours between pumping sessions, it wasn’t pretty) or stop breastfeeding. If a woman’s job doesn’t accommodate her taking a 15-minute pumping break every three hours, or if a woman’s employer doesn’t provide a private, clean place for her to pump, her choice is made for her: she has to quit breastfeeding.

I worked in restaurants for ten years and I never saw a restaurant that would accommodate a breastfeeding server. If a server every asked a manager if she could take a 15-minute break every three hours and have the break room all to herself for pumping, I imagine the manager a) laughed, b) said something asinine like, “If I give you a break every three hours, I’d have to give all the employees a break every three hours, and I’m not gonna do that, so the answer is no,” and c) fired her if she went ahead and pumped on the job.

Most working mothers don’t have the luxury of a supportive employer. Imagine how many more mothers would breastfeed for a full year if their employers were supportive. I’ve heard stories of women having to pump in filthy restrooms, in cubicles, and in their cars because their employers gave them time but no place to pump.

Encouraging employers to accommodate breastfeeding women would be difficult and possibly expensive. It’s a lot easier to make mothers feel like it’s 100% their responsibility. That they alone need to figure out a way to keep breastfeeding. That the rest of society—including corporate citizens—has no responsibility to help or even make reasonable accommodations. That if they can’t manage to figure out a way to continue breastfeeding after they go back to work, they’re bad mothers.

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