Milking it in California

Edited to add: Two other blogs have now picked up on this story.

The Lactivist notes “The International Breast Milk Project in the News Again“.

And MamaBear at breastfeedingsymbol.org has done some ringing around – directly to the iThemba Lethu orphanage. Her post You’re Going to Want to Read This details the fact the the numbers are still just not. adding. up:

Since the IBMP made their promise to send 55,000 ounces of donated breast milk, they have sent the one shipment of 5,343 ounces in May 2007. Their rate of shipments to Africa is about two shipments a year so far.

Why is it important to know all of this? Because the International Breast Milk Project got 55,000 ounces of donated milk because of Oprah. On Oprah’s show, it was stated that the donated milk would go to Africa, not 25% of it. The IBMP promised that all those 55,000 ounces would be sent to Africa, and that thereafter, 25% of what is donated would be sent. At the current rate and quantity that the IBMP is sending milk (an average of two shipments a year), it would take almost five years to send the originally promised 55,000 ounces to Africa.

MamaBear also notes ways to contribute that don’t line anyone’s pockets: you can donate milk and/or money directly to iThemba Lethu, or to non-profit milk banking or milk sharing networks in your locality.

~~
The O.C. Register today carried this story: Rancho realtor donates breast milk to Africa.

You might recall that I’ve written in the past about the close ties between breastmilk-for-profit Prolacta and the “International Breastmilk Project”. The Oprah-advertised “charity”, supposedly independent from Prolacta, was outed as providing 75% of milk donated for African orphans directly to Prolacta for sale within the United States:

Feed the wo-orld… one baby, anyhow.

Salon’s “Milk Money”: media scrutiny of the IBMP-Prolacta partnership

At the time, I held the opinion that this “collaboration” was essentially a push for Prolacta to gain a supposedly arms-length “non-profit” front for its milk collection activities. And the exploitation of the image of sick black starving babies doesn’t hurt, either. This is nothing new for Prolacta. Prolacta has dubbed its commercial milk-collection arm the “National Milk Bank”, with an “org” suffix (nationalmilkbank.org). When it was first set up, Prolacta-NMB claimed openly on its webpage to be a non-profit organisation. (The claim has since been removed).

Unsurprisingly, women are more likely to donate milk when they feel it is going to a good cause, rather than when they know that they’re being exploited for massive profits by venture capitalists.

Of course, my concerns were dismissed by the IBMP founder. No, she said, we just have this little arrangement with Prolacta, they’re helping us out with processing. We’re not Prolacta, we’re totally independent. Prolacta are being all altruistic in all this, and by the way, aren’t they lovely to donate all these resources for the greater good? Don’t they deserve some good publicity for it?

So guess who’s the director of the new Californian branch of the “International Breastmilk Project”? April Brown. Daughter of Elena Medo. Who’s Elena Medo? The CEO and founder of Prolacta.

Arm’s length arrangement, my arse.

*** If you’re in the USA or Canada and wish to donate milk to a real non-profit organisation, check out HMBANA, the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. ***

Filed under: breastfeeding, ethics, obstreperation

ACT parliament improves its mother-friendliness

[Image credit: The Age, "Charlotte Makes a Meal of Question Time"]

Cheers to the ACT parliament for becoming the first parliament in Australia to get Australian Breastfeeding Association accreditation as a breastfeeding-friendly workplace, as reported in IBN News.

The ABA accreditation standards can be found here. What this means is that now ACT parliamentary members and staff will have access to flexible breaks to breastfeed or express milk, clean and appropriate facilities to express and store milk, and information on these facilities provided to female employees. They may also have access to the “optional criteria” of flexi-time/job-sharing options, on-site childcare, parking for carers to bring children to the workplace, and further information and referrals.

I find it rather strange that the criteria don’t include processes to educate other employees about breastfeeding, and procedures to deal with those who create a hostile environment breastfeeding mothers, be the mothers employees or guests in the workplace. These issues are (somewhat inadequately) covered elsewhere, but I hoped that specific inclusion in a breastfeeding-friendly workplace standard might bring them to the fore.

Several parliaments, including the ACT Legislative Assembly, decided in 2003 to begin allowing breastfeeding in the Parliamentary chamber. This change occurred after the incident in which ALP MP Kirstie Marshall was ejected from the Victorian State parliament floor for breastfeeding her daughter. Twelve-day-old Charlotte was considered a “stranger in the house” under standing orders at the time. At the time, Liberal minister Amanda Vanstone had a dig at Marshall, saying that she pitied her baby for being fed in “a noisy and testosterone-filled televised parliamentary debate”. As always, women are expected to confine themselves, to avoid public life dominated by aggressive men, rather than men being expected to act like decent human beings – regardless of whether there is or isn’t an infant present!

Filed under: Politics, breastfeeding, food/drink, reproductive freedoms

Stunning News

Guest posted by Kate Harding

Item: School childhood obesity programs are failing, experts say

“Any person looking at the published literature about these programs would have to conclude that they are generally not working,” said Tom Baranowski, a pediatrics professor at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine. He studies behavioral nutrition.

If you’re not too busy fanning yourself and going goggle-eyed in disbelief, read on.

Filed under: Media, breastfeeding, health

Engage obstreperal lobes

Lauredhel has updated her post from last month about the lack of transparency surrounding ProLacta’s International Breastmilk Project with the latest news. As thought, they couldn’t lie straight in bed.

Feed the wo-orld… one baby, anyhow.

UPDATE (8 June 2007) by Lauredhel: Salon has taken up the story.
Milk Money

After May 31, however, IBMP will send 25 percent of all donations received to Africa, and 75 percent will be sold to Prolacta for $1 an ounce. What kind of profit margin does this mean for Prolacta? Potentially a motherlode. If, as Elster told me, the average donation runs around 180 ounces, then that would mean that 135 ounces (75 percent) “sold” to Prolacta would generate around $4,725 (at $35 an ounce) for the company, or about $3,890 after subtracting the expense of donor processing (about $700 per donor) and the cash payment to IBMP.
[...]
Is giving 45 ounces of breast milk at a cost of $135 to African babies really a good exchange rate for a commodity that can deliver $3,890 to a for-profit company?

Filed under: activism/charity, breastfeeding, ethics

Feed the wo-orld… one baby, anyhow.

UPDATE: 4 June 2007
Jill Youse has finally responded in the Mothering forums.

We were absolutely correct.

Prolacta is skimming off 75% of milk donated by mothers for Africa, for sale and for profit within the USA.
Prolacta is “reimbursing” the International Breastmilk Project the princely sum of one dollar per ounce that they take.

Prolacta sells its breastmilk product to US intensive care units for around thirty dollars an ounce (Some published figures have been in the forties, I have chosen the lowest figure).

—————————————————————————-

I’ve posted in the past about Prolacta’s for-profit breastmilk-mining enterprise in the USA, and their efforts to “partner” with “non-profit” organisations to provide an altruistic veneer for their activities.

Prolacta is now involved with the International Breastmilk Project, which ships (some) donated milk overseas to Africa, and the process is shrouded in mystery. It’s obvious to anyone involved in charity work that such an effort is destined to be unbelievably inefficient, and perhaps more than a little condescending – white wealthy women’s milk being shipped in to “save” sick black orphan babies. Much has been made of Prolacta’s “altruistic” involvement, which we have been told they “are not making a dime off”.

For an idea of scale, 5 000 ounces of milk every six months, the commitment the IBMP has made (according to The Lactivist), is about enough to feed one baby for 166 days, or six babies for 27 days. So the IBMP, with all its global publicity and PR, has reportedly committed to feed … one baby.

Donors signing up to the IBMP are required to sign a release for Prolacta to use their milk for research. The nature of this research is not elucidated in the consent form. Women I have spoken with usually believe that it must be altruistic research designed to increase the world’s knowledge of breastfeeding. In fact, venture-capitalist-funded Prolacta has an aggressive patenting program grabbing intellectual property rights to the various components of mother’s milk, with a view to formulating proprietary pharmaceutical products and (most likely) mother’s milk substitutes.

Let me make this clear: women are not paid for their milk. They donate it for free.

A number of people in the lactation support world, including me, have been questioning the transparency in the International Breastmilk Project – and answers have not been forthcoming.

Read what The Lactivist has to say. Lacking answers from the IBMP and Prolacta for her questions, she has started to do some research, and what she has managed to find isn’t promising for the altruism of this new partnership.

Filed under: activism/charity, breastfeeding, ethics, racism

Breastfeeding Manifesto

That’s the document spearheading a UK campaign from five royal colleges of medicine, nursing and midwifery and backed by UNICEF, which aims to introduce laws supporting breastfeeding mothers by

• making it an offense for anyone to attempt to stop a mother breastfeeding in public
• mandating that all employers provide nursing mothers with two half-hour breaks during the working day to devote to breastfeeding

Read the whole article (via Feministing)
(beware, there’s the usual rubbish in comments to the newspaper article comparing breastfeeding to urinating in public and lewdly failing to distinguish between the sexual and the nutritional functions of breasts)

Filed under: breastfeeding, reproductive freedoms

Parenting While Female: “It’s Not About You”

I’ve been contemplating this post: The Male Gaze… falls upon a Nursing Mother…. by Morgan Gallagher. I think there’s an important truth in there, something feminists find themselves saying over and over and over again: “It’s not about you.“

Breastfeeding fear seems to be partly about keeping mothers in the home where they “belong”, partly about fear of our mammalian-ness (mammalhood?), and partly about the opportunistic pathologisation of womanhood and motherhood. But it’s also about defiance of the male gaze. Women’s bodies are battlegrounds, and when breastfeeding, a women is committing the cardinal sin of rejecting the male gaze. Not even defending herself from it, but rejecting it entirely. If there’s one thing sexist pigs can’t stand, it’s women not paying attention to them.

Moral panics about women mothering in public happen with dispiriting regularity. Here in a Florida Sentinel comments section, for example, one commenter compares their discomfort on seeing breastfeeding to their discomfort on seeing fat or disabled people going out in public. Another compares it to public urination, defecation, and sexual intercourse. A nursing mother is accused of being a child molester, another diagnoses mothers as mentally ill. Another calls feeding a child “disgusting”, “wrong”, and “filthy”.

Then – there are these comments:

Filed under: breastfeeding, moral panics, reproductive freedoms

Everyday Codebreaking in Australia, vol.1

As you know, I’ve been talking a bit about violations of the WHO Code. I’ve started collecting some examples of everyday Code-breaking in Australia.

My last example was of Wyeth’s transgressions. Have you heard of Nutricia, a Dutch Numico subsidiary? Some examples of issues in Numico’s past include direct-to-mother promotional campaigns in China, hospital violations in Indonesia, violations in Russia, and concealment and lies about salmonella contamination of their infant formula products in the UK and France.

Nutricia’s Australian website proclaims:

“… at Nutricia Australia we have adopted one of the strictest interpretations of the code in the interest of mother and baby.”

This is false.

IBFAN gives a detailed summary of the World Health Organisation Code on the Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes here. Note particularly these articles:

“There should be no advertising or other form of promotion to the general public of products within the scope of this Code.” Article 5.1
* Companies are banned from seeking contact with pregnant women and mothers and must not promote products covered by the Code to them or the general public in any way .[...] Advertising is a form of promotion as are: direct mail, leaflets and pamphlets, posters, product samples, free gifts, video shows and lectures.

[...] Article 5.3 covers retail outlets. It clarifies the ban on promotion by citing the following examples:
* point of sale advertising
* giving of samples
* discount coupons, premiums, special sales, loss-leaders and tie-in sales.”

Here’s what dropped into my letterbox last week. The Woolworths discount promotions leaflet is on the left, and the Coles one is on the right.

Filed under: breastfeeding, consumerism, family, peeves