The Global Commitment of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine

The founders of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine recognized that a physician organization dedicated to the promotion and support of breastfeeding would have to be international in its scope. There is an important public health threat with which the practitioners of breastfeeding medicine must contend of a kind that rarely challenges other medical disciplines, although such challenges are not unknown. The tobacco industry, for example, has deliberately subverted the health and the very lives of millions of people for so many decades in order to reap huge profits. Much the same can be said of the fast food industry. But how many industries have placed the lives of millions of infants and their mothers in jeopardy by convincing consumers that its product can actually replace an entire human organ system, a product that allegedly can so completely outperform that system as to reduce it to the status of a vestigial remnant? By means of discharge packs, coupons, “milk nurses,” and manipulation of physicians to serve as their unwitting shills, the infant formula industry has been highly successful in persuading the public that the “primitive” practice of breastfeeding can now be replaced by something modern, something convenient, something safe, and something truly awe-inspiring because it is supposedly the end result of cutting-edge scientific research.

This industry is wildly successful on a global scale. And lest we make the mistake of presuming that the aggressive marketing of infant formula internationally has abated since the inauguration of the World Health Organization Code, we would be well advised to take note of this quote:

… more than 80% of industry growth will be in Asia and Latin America between now and 2013. At Mead Johnson, eight of our top ten markets are in these regions and we are investing further to build our strong presence. The result of our strategies and investments is an excellent 23% increase in sales in the first quarter, excluding the effect of currency …

—Steve Golsby, President and CEO Mead Johnson Nutrition Company Q1 2009 Mead Johnson Nutrition Company Earnings Conference Call April 28, 2009

The formula industry can easily underwrite its marketing strategies with millions of dollars. Physicians who wish to champion the cause of breastfeeding promotion and support are truly up against a behemoth. Which physician organization in the world today is prepared to be the David to this Goliath?

The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine has long understood that there is a strong moral imperative for physicians to protest against the overwhelming pressure brought to bear by powerful multinational corporations to dissuade families from engaging in the life-protecting practice of breastfeeding in an unrelenting and single-minded pursuit of profit. This is as true today as it was when Dr. Cicely Williams declared almost three quarters of a century ago:

… if your lives were as embittered as mine, seeing day after day this massacre of the innocents by unsuitable feeding, then I believe you would feel, as I do, that misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition, and that these deaths should be regarded as murder.

—Speech before the Singapore Rotary Club, 1939

As a medical society dedicated to the health and welfare of mothers and infants, the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine accepts no funding from the very companies that seek to compete against one of the most effective public health measures known to mankind: the protection, promotion, and support of breastfeeding. The Academy may not be counted among the most affluent or influential of the many healthcare organizations around the world, but in the final analysis:

… What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

—Mark 8:36

As members of the Academy, we can all take great pride in this simple statement from the 2008 ABM Position Statement on Breastfeeding:

Corporations and all other manufacturers and distributors of breastmilk substitutes have a moral responsibility to adhere to the World Health Assembly's International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes and subsequent resolutions, and physicians have the responsibility to avoid interactions and support of companies that do not adhere to this Code.

We invite all professional health societies to join us in the noble pursuit to restore the practice of breastfeeding to its rightful place in the promotion and preservation of maternal and infant health worldwide. We invite our colleagues in industry to do the same.