Each year, World Breastfeeding Week is marked from 1-7 August. This year, the focus of the awareness campaign is about working mothers and maternity rights that support breastfeeding. You! takes a look...
“ Breastmilk works like a baby’s first vaccine, protecting infants from potentially deadly diseases and giving them all the nourishment they need to survive and thrive,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO.
Each year, World Breastfeeding Week is marked from 1-7 August, supported by WHO and UNICEF. This year, the focus of the awareness campaign is about working mothers and maternity rights that support breastfeeding. Campaign theme is ‘let’s make breastfeeding and work, work’.
Every child has the right to good health and yet, many children do not receive adequate nutrition leading to stunting, illness, and sometimes death. WHO estimates that globally, breastfeeding could save the lives of over 820,000 children under the age of 5 years, each year. The key point is ‘optimal’ breastfeeding, which means women should start breastfeeding within 1 hour of birth; provide exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of life; and introduce complementary solid foods at 6 months together with continued breastfeeding up to 2 years of age.
In Pakistan, around 42 per cent of children are stunted. According to the latest survey from 2022, less than 50 per cent of children under six months of age are exclusively breastfed and the majority of women who breastfeed are homemakers, while the proportion of working women in this is very small. WHO recommends at least 18 weeks of paid maternity leaves. Focusing on working women is also important if we hope to achieve the WHO target of improving the rate of exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months to at least 50 per cent by 2025.
There are several challenges leading to fewer numbers of working women breastfeeding and these challenges require our collective efforts to support our women and the future of our children. Lack of awareness about benefits of breastfeeding, limited understanding about the technique, limited access to counselling and support, long work hours, un-supportive maternity leave policies, and lack of facilities at workplace such as day care and lactation rooms to express milk are some of the main reasons leading to fewer working women exclusively breastfeeding their children.
“I work at a private organisation and when I had my baby; it was around the Covid-19 pandemic period. We were allowed 12 weeks of maternity leave, but, with the condition that six weeks were to be taken prior to the due date and six weeks after the due date. This was difficult because you need maximum time to recover and to form a bond with the baby and importantly, to breastfeed. My head of department also tried to discourage me from taking full leaves. I had to return to work when my baby was barely two months old. We do not have adequate support at our work place to continue breastfeeding and women are forced to quit. It is not an easy choice,” shares Ibtisam, a young mother working at a private organisation.
“I work as a house help to shoulder the burden of financial responsibilities with my husband. We barely make enough to make ends meet. I have four children. Of course, there are no paid leaves after childbirth and I had to return back to work as soon as possible, which also meant I had to rely on formula milk. It was an expensive option so, I would sometimes dilute it to make it last longer. Then, I couldn’t feed my second child for the recommended duration because I had become pregnant again. So, breastfeeding my babies while at work has been a challenging task for me. We, poor women, are not even entitled to take a maternity leave,” comments Abida.
“I have a 9 to 5 job and despite lack of facilities at my workplace for new mums, I am determined to breastfeed my baby. This means that I have to use women’s restroom to express milk and there is no storage, leading to wastage. At least, this allows me to continue to breastfeed my child,” elucidates Salma.
“I feed my child in the morning before going to work, and then after I go back home, about nine hours later. This means I have to face discomfort at work, milk supply issues, and my child has to receive supplementary feed with formula milk,” expresses Madeeha.
“I have three children and I work as a technician in a healthcare setting. When I had my first two babies, I was not fully aware of all the options available that could have helped me continue with breastfeeding. Then with my third child, my doctor told me that I could pump and provide feed for my child. Initially, I tried. There was no area for pumping at my workplace so I used to go to the toilet to do it. The expressed milk is supposed to be kept at controlled temperature and because of no such facility, the milk would go bad and my effort would be wasted. I had to face a lot of discomfort and pain during this time. Then, I stopped doing it because it was frustrating and my efforts were futile. I know female colleagues who are afraid of all the issues related to breastfeeding for working women so they don’t even try to breastfeed or stop after a month or two. I also faced a lot of ridicule and scolding by my manager and it was really tough for me but I stood up for myself. Don’t think that nothing can change. All of us can raise our voices for better policies and attitudes at our workplaces,” empasises Uzma, another working mother.
“I work at a busy reception area and lucky for me that my organisation offered a day care facility for children and my manager was very supportive. Actually, when my maternity leave was ending, I tried to shift my baby to bottle-feed but she wouldn’t have it! She didn’t give me much choice so I got her admitted to the day care when she was around three months old. I would regularly go to feed her. My manager used to say the he’s not doing me any favours but it is the organisation that is supporting me in this. Today, my child is almost two years old and I have managed to continue to breastfeed her,” narrates Noor .
“I worked at a school from 7 am - 2 pm and I was not allowed to go to feed my child in between. There was no day care facility for staff’s children either. I tried to pump and store milk for my child before I left, but it was not enough, which meant exclusive breastfeeding was not possible because of lack of facilities,” tells an anonymous school-teacher.
In the USA in 2010, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was amended to require employers to provide basic accommodations, such as time and space, for breastfeeding mothers at work. It specifies, “A place other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk.”
In a ground-breaking step this year, the Maternity and Paternity Leave Bill 2020 was passed in Pakistan. After this new legislation, women in the federal territory can now take up to six months of leaves after the first birth and fathers can take one-month leaves (three for the duration of their service). One can hope that provinces will also follow suit and will introduce similar legislations, which may promote exclusive breastfeeding in working women across the country.
“No one brought my baby to me soon after birth. When I got him, I had difficulty in feeding him. I did not know there are lactation experts available here. I mentioned this to my doctor who said, “no problem, you can give him formula milk”. I wish I knew at that time that there’s support available and then I wouldn’t have given up so easily,” laments Rose Mary, who works at a charitable organisation.
“When I was having trouble feeding my baby, someone told me about a lactation nurse at a private hospital. She observed how I was feeding and guided me about techniques to improve the flow. It worked. I am glad that I got the help I needed at the right time, which meant that I was able to breastfeed both my children,” describes Sofia, who works in a magazine in a reputed newspaper.
Hospitals can play an important role in ensuring that they have trained staff who can start immediate skin-to-skin contact with the mother and initiate breastfeeding within one hour of birth, especially after caesarean section, providing all the necessary support to new mothers in starting breastfeeding postpartum.
Finally, administrators and managers can play an important role in making their organisations more inclusive for women, especially new mothers. Mothers should not have to choose between their children’s health vis-à-vis breastfeeding and working. Additionally, longer durations of breastfeeding also contribute to the health of mothers because it reduces the risk of ovarian and breast cancer and helps space pregnancies.
On this World Breastfeeding Week, policy-makers, organisation heads, healthcare professionals, media, and all of us, together, can commit to ensure that women do not have to choose between their work and breastfeeding their children. Let us raise our voices to promote best practices in our workplaces related to breastfeeding support.
The writer is a LUMS alumna and a community social worker with special interest in public health, philosophy, and human rights. She can be reached at mariamk27@hotmail.com. Her twitter handle is @mariamibkhan
WORLD BREASTFEEDING WEEK
First celebrated in 1992, World Breastfeeding Week is a global celebration that occurs every year from the 1st to the 7th of August in more than 120 countries. It commemorates the Innocenti Declaration signed in August 1990, by government policymakers, WHO, UNICEF and other organisations, to protect, promote and support breastfeeding.
World Breastfeeding Week aims to highlight the huge benefits that breastfeeding can bring to the health and welfare of babies and benefits to maternal health, focusing on good nutrition, poverty reduction, and food security. World Breastfeeding Week has the dual goal of improving the health of babies and promoting, protecting, and supporting the rights of women to breastfeed anywhere and at any time.
Increasing breastfeeding to near-universal levels could save more than 700,000 lives every year, the majority being children under six months. Breastfeeding promotes better health for mothers and children alike. Breastfeeding decreases the risk of mothers developing breast cancer, ovarian cancer, type-2 diabetes, and heart disease. It is estimated that increased breastfeeding could avert 20,000 maternal deaths each year due to breast cancer.
Word Breastfeeding Week is organised every year by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA), a global network that aims to protect, promote, and support breastfeeding around the world. WABA collaborates with the World Health Organization and UNICEF to promote the importance of family-friendly policies that enable breastfeeding. This includes enacting paid maternity leave for a minimum of 18 weeks. And to support mums returning to work, employers should ensure new moms have adequate breastfeeding breaks, access to a safe, private, and hygienic space for expressing and storing breastmilk as well as affordable childcare.
Source: medela.com.au
