Abstract
It is time to look back at the past year, my first year as President of the Academy of Breastfeeding, and an important year of this organization. We did celebrate the 100th birthday of one of our Founders, Dr. Ruth Lawrence and looked back with gratitude and admiration for the work of all our Founders. The 29th Annual International Conference in Schaumburg, USA, lies behind us with excellent speakers, many participants from all parts of the world and robust discussions about policies and practices in Breastfeeding and Lactation Medicine. Now, we are at the end of 2024 and the start of a new year. Time to look back and to look forward.
For the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, this has not been an easy year. We are in the process of giving Committees and Working Groups more structure—with sound policies and procedures. The Chair of our Government Committee, Dr. Julie Ware, is leading here to make it easier for all volunteers to start, to work and to end a period in a committee or task force. But of course, this is a very intense period with a lot of additional work. And our finances give some challenges for the future—it is our fiduciary duty to carefully use our resources.
At the same time, there are so many reasons to be grateful. We have an excellent Board of Directors, and I thank them for their great collaboration in achieving the best for our Academy. This year we have to say goodbye to Dr. Karen Bodnar and Dr. Yvonne Lefort, who both finished their terms and were not up for reelection. I thank them for their contributions in discussion, for their work in Committees and for their work on giving Breastfeeding Medicine a voice with their expertise on specific breastfeeding medicine topics.
I am grateful for all the members who are active in our organization: the Committee Chairs, the members of Committees and Task Forces, the members who write and react on MyABM, the members who write our protocols and are active in watching where the reaction of ABM is necessary, the members who encourage each other, when someone is facing criticism from colleagues. Again, this year we had a great output of documents, both protocols and statements, on a variety of subjects. And members contributed to discussions in the Global Breastfeeding Collective, the USBC and other organizations, nationally, and internationally.
I am grateful for all our members, who help couples who want to breastfeed or are breastfeeding or pump and feed—through information in pregnancy, during birth, in the NICU and in the maternity ward, in the first few days at home and later on, who are counseling and supporting on themes like on drugs and lactation, on breastfeeding problems of mother or child (or both), on exclusive breastfeeding and supplementation, on wounded nipples and mastitis, on complementary feeding, workplace, and breastfeeding, and all these other themes that come up in the journey of feeding a child.
In the past decade, there have been many articles about the risks of not breastfeeding and the costs of not breastfeeding for us as a society, lately by (among others) our member Dr. Melissa Bartick 1 And rightly so, because it is (unfortunately) often through cost saving and economic benefits that we can make decisionmakers and funders listen to policymakers and pay for breastfeeding programs in all communities and countries. A German saying is “if it doesn’t cost anything it does not have any value.” And yes, breastfeeding has a value, an economic value both for families and for countries.
And in my daily work, this is not what drives me to Breastfeeding Medicine. It is the contact with the parents, the needs of the babies and children, the daily questions, the uncertainties of the parents about doing it “right,” the problems they encounter that are sometimes very complicated, but also sometimes very easy to solve that gives me both at work in my practice and as President in the Academy a deep feeling of satisfaction. It is astonishing how often I meet deep gratefulness from the parents, when the barriers they have met were not as high as they did think, and they can reach or even exceed their own set breastfeeding goals.
There is this old tale, which inspires me. 2 Someone walks along a big construction site. He asks one of the workers: what are you working on? And the worker answers: I am cutting stones. Again, he asks another worker: what are you doing here? This time the man answers: I am building a wall. The visitor tries again and addresses a third person: What is your duty here on this construction site? And this third person answers: I am building a cathedral.
What we are doing matters. Not only in the moment do we meet the mother–child dyad, but far beyond. For this individual mother, for this child, for this family it fundamentally changes their health and their perspectives. For our society, it is a small token of the value of breastfeeding, and it contributes to the perception that breastfeeding is the normal way of feeding our babies and children.
So, I am grateful for all of you who read this, members and nonmembers, physicians, lactation consultants, nurses, midwives, psychologists, peer supporters, and so many of you working in other occupations, readers of this journal, who work with parents in all the fields I mentioned above. I wish you all in the coming new year every now and then a deep feeling of satisfaction at the awareness of bringing little stones together for a wall in a cathedral. Happy New Year 2025 to all of you!