The 2022 theme for World Breastfeeding Week, ‘Step up for Breastfeeding: Educate and Support’, seeks to involve governments, communities, and individuals. The theme aims to raise awareness about sustainable breastfeeding environment.
How often does a lactating mother become a site of public gaze and harassment! For an act as basic to humankind as breastfeeding, the lactating parent undergoes discomforts of all kinds, be it physical or social.
Amongst the several benefits of breastfeeding for both—the mother and the child—this intimate act of caregiving provides the required nutrients to the child and also acts as a source of immunity against allergies and illnesses.
Studies have proven that the breastfed children are less likely to be obese or overweight and more likely to perform in intelligence tests.
Breastfeeding also helps to create a strong emotional bond between the mother and her child and reduces the chances of breast cancer and diabetics in the mother.
However, the lack of infrastructural facilities and the social stigma around breastfeeding holds back many lactating mothers as they don’t want to compromise their privacy and be prone to uncomfortable gazes.
Young mothers already struggle a lot with body and life changing issues post their pregnancies. Let’s do our bit and make this experience a little less troublesome for them.
In 2018, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern adorned international headlines when she took her three-month-old daughter for the UN general body meeting in the US as she was breastfeeding her.
Several activists throughout the world have been coming forward to normalize the act of breastfeeding and raise awareness around the same.
Since 1992, the first week of August has been declared as the World Breastfeeding Week (WBW) by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Awareness (WABA). Their aim is to inform, anchor, engage and galvanize action on breastfeeding and related issues.
