Human Rights & Long-term Solutions 

Ted Greiner, PhD, nutritionist, International Child Health Unit,  
Uppsala University, Sweden  

We human beings created civilization to enable us to earn as good a living as possible and to raise our families optimally. But we now seem to be forgetting the latter purpose. Why? Perhaps we have to admit that this is because we have allowed it to be that way. We have not used our voting power and other democratic means to achieve balanced development. But it does not have to happen this way. Faced with enormous challenges we too often tend to become pacified. Indeed, the military-industrial complex depends on us reacting this way. My goal in this talk is to address and overcome this tendency toward passivity. 

Newborns are the most helpless and vulnerable of all people and thus need the most support. We expect mothers to provide this support, including exclusive breastfeeding. But do we give mothers the support they need in order to provide this service to society? If we do not and they fail to breastfeeding exclusively, we know from many recent studies that many of the benefits of breastfeeding to both mother and child are lost. It is not the mother who is to blame in this case. In most cases it is society which failed to provide women with the information and support they needed to make optimal decisions on infant feeding and to implement them. 

Babies also need one person to bond to in the early months of life. Research suggests that multiple caretakers is not desirable during this sensitive period of life. This is one more argument for doing everything we can to avoid separating mothers and babies at this time. Later bonds with the father and other care-givers become increasingly desirable. 

We did not know about the importance of exclusive breastfeeding and mother-infant bonding when we engineered the societies we live in today. But these issues are important enough to justify changing society; indeed they are such fundamental rights for such vulnerable members of society who cannot argue on their own behalf that we are obligated to do so. 

Now we need to develop a stategy for how to achieve this challenging undertaking. Let us begin with the human rights aspect. We have already heard which formal instruments are available but many of us are not used to thinking in these terms. Indeed, some countries, particularly the USA, do not accept that there is such a thing as economic, social and cultural rights. Thus let us look at an analogy from among the civil and political rights that we may be more familiar with. 

How many women in this room have the right to vote? OK, everyone. In how many cases did your great grandmothers have the right to vote 100 years ago? Only New Zealand. So we see that a right is created and doing so involves changing cultural norms. A century ago in most countries anyone who said voting was a woman's right was considered a radical or worse. Today the opposite is the case, the idea that women should not get to vote would be considered deviant. How did women get this right? Through struggle. 

How many of you are forced to vote? No doubt there is a certain degree of compulsion in some countries, but in general let us agree that having a right normally does not mean you are forced to exercise it. We often need to remind people of this when they suspect that our giving arguments in favor of breastfeeding somehow means we intend to force women to breastfeed. 

Finally, what kind of arguments are usually brought to bear to resist this kind of social change? Eighty years ago in Sweden I understand that one argument used against universal sufferage was that it would be too expensive. This sounds silly today only because the norm has changed. Economic arguments are not a legitimate basis for denying that rights exist, even if there are often are true economic constraints for states that want to pursue a human rights approach to development. 

How many in this room, if you or your partner had a baby today, would have the right to stay home with the baby for the first six months? Okay, maybe 1/4. And in some cases this is due to your employer rather than national legislation. Now how many would be able to take this time at home without suffering any serious risks financially, in job security or in seniority? Now it is very few. How many wish this were a right in your country? The vast majority. 

And what is the main reason it is not a right? Yes, in the first place simply because people are not aware of its importance. There is no relevant social norm and indeed it may be considered to be a luxury that we cannot afford. So we have a big job in front of us. 

We must be realistic about what forces are arrayed against us also. When I visited the ILO nearly a decade ago I met three groups who were opposed to increased maternity benefits for working women. One, seconded from UNFPA, felt that no benefits should be given to women for having babies, as this is pronatalist, only encouraging even greater population growth. Another pointed out that governments are being told by the IMF and the World Bank that they must export their way out of povety through the comparative advantage of a low labor cost. These governments will not be amenable to ideas that increase their labor costs. The third group was working to remove certain existing conventions for supporting working women. For example some say women should not have to work at night or lift heavy objects and they have the effect of preventing women from having equal access to some jobs. Indeed, we must be wary of anything that makes women more expensive to employers. For this reason the existing ILO Convention 103 on maternity protection from 1952 specifically prohibits charging employers for the costs. They should be born by society as a whole. 

On the other hand, let us remember that many of these same arguments could have been used against abolishing slavery. Doing so was expensive and even destroyed entire industries. It also had little if any effect on reducing discrimination, perhaps even creating a backlash for some time. 

These are constraints to be overcome, NOT arguments against the fact that women and newborns have the right to spend the first few months after birth together. Once that right is accepted and a social norm starts to become established, we will find that working women can obtain the support they need for exclusive breastfeeding: economic support, health care, emotional support, lactation counselling when needed. It could become a political platform and the feminists will join us when they realize we are not working in a way that will add to women's burdens but will increase the support they have a right to. After all, as we already agreed, half the voters are women. This is how Sweden arrived at its current situation in which women receive 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, followed by nine months of paid parental leave. Political parties will vye to be the one that offers the most. 

Does it feel like we are standing at the bottom of a cliff, looking up and wondering how we will get to the top? Well, remember that we have been there before. Twenty-five years ago, many of us who dreamed of a world in which baby food advertising was banned were considered dreamers and radicals. Today many baby food company employees are proud that their company no longer has wet nurses, no longer hands out free samples like a heroin salesmen saying, "Here, lady, first one's free." Just imagine if we had taken a passive stance in the face of the constraints we faced. The world would be drenched in baby food advertising on ever-more invasive television, radio, billboard and other media. I am certain that the number of human beings alive today who would have died from unnecessary bottle feeding is in the millions, probably more than have been saved by vaccination. 

Social norms can be changed through conscious struggle. Let us put our efforts into mapping out how that struggle should be conducted. We will need to work on two fronts at the same time. 

1) Fight for the right of working mothers and newborns to spend the first few months together, preferably the six month recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding. 

2) In the meantime, find ways to help working mothers cope with situations in which this right is denied them. But always keep in mind the long-term goal. 

This two-front battle will be challenging but it is important, neglected, and achievable. Let's get started!