Protecting and promoting breastfeeding.
Have you heard about the Breastfeeding Manifesto?
The growing coalition supporting the Breastfeeding Manifesto includes all of the main breastfeeding support organisations, the NCT, The Royal College of Midwives, The Royal College of General Practitioners, UNICEF, MIDIRS and the Royal College of Nursing among its 35 supporting organisations.
The coalition is aiming to improve awareness of the health benefits of breastfeeding and its role in reducing health inequalities.
The Breastfeeding Manifesto outlines seven key objectives necessary if the UK is to initiate and sustain improvements in infant feeding practice:
- Implement the Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding.
- Implement postnatal care guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and the Accompanying Public Health Evidence into Practice document.
- Improve training for health professionals.
- Work with employers to create a supportive environment for breastfeeding mothers.
- Develop policy and practice to support breastfeeding in public places.
- Include breastfeeding education in the curriculum.
- Adopt the World Health Organisation Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes and subsequent relevant resolutions.
Working towards these objectives will help to ensure that women, irrespective of their socio-economic or ethnic background, are empowered to breastfeed for as long as they choose and that more babies can enjoy the benefits of their mothers? milk.
You can read the Breastfeeding Manifesto at:
www.breastfeedingmanifesto.org.uk
If you support the objectives please add your name as an individual to the manifesto. It is quick and easy to do.
Simply go to: www.breastfeedingmanifesto.org.uk
and click on ?sign up?.
Here you can add your own name to the manifesto, find out how you can ask your MP to sign and be kept `in the loop`. Please write to your MP if s/he hasn't signed.
The manifesto has already achieved cross-party support but to achieve the impact at Governmental level that is necessary, lots more individuals need to sign. We are aiming for around 5000.
On 16 May, individual coalition members will meet MPs who have not yet signed the manifesto to galvanise further parliamentary support.
Together we can make a wide scale real and lasting change to the health and wellbeing of future generations.
Best wishes
from the La Leche League Great Britain/BMC liaison team
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