#BTColumn – Breastfeeding: Part of our national health strategy

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by David Comissiong

If ever there was a time to seriously engage our population in a comprehensive national health and wellness improvement programme, that time is now.

This, after all,  is an era in which not only are we being forced to contend with a multiplicity of health challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has sent our way, but it is also an era in which we are grappling with a national health budget that has spiralled out of control.

This is forcing us to acknowledge that the only way forward for us as a nation is to put the emphasis on preventing disease and ill-health rather than on spending huge sums of money that we do not have on seeking to cure diseases and ill-health!

And if, in response to these challenges, we make the effort to think deeply and realistically about the critical lifestyle changes and health practices that we need to embrace, we will discover that very close to the top of that list will be the practice of breastfeeding the children of our nation for at least the first six months of their lives.

That breastfeeding of babies should be considered a national health priority that is in the same scale of importance as tackling the scourge of chronic non-communicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension, or of overcoming obesity and the other factors that underlie the epidemics of stroke and heart disease, should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to the messages that the world’s most eminent public health institutions have been sending our way for years now.

The consistent and unanimous testimony of such institutions as the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Breastfeeding and Child Nutrition Foundation (BCNF) is that breastfeeding protects babies against infections, provides them with the best source of nutrition, contributes to the emotional well-being of our children, causes a reduced incidence of later diseases such as Type 2 diabetes mellitus, and ultimately contributes to an improvement of the child’s IQ and school readiness.

We have also been learning from public health organizations that breastfeeding delivers a multiplicity of benefits to the mother as well: to name a few, spacing of pregnancies, protection against breast cancer and lower rates of ovarian cancer.

So, if the benefits of breastfeeding are so clear and numerous, what then might be responsible for such a troubling proportion of Barbadian and Caribbean women not embracing this wholesome, health-enhancing practice?

Some people point to our history, to the degree to which the traditional African (and European) practice of breastfeeding was assailed on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean during those cruel centuries of enslavement.

It needs to be noted that there was no significant sexual or gender division of labour on the slave plantation – enslaved women who worked as “field slaves” were subjected to the same intense physical, backbreaking work as their male counterparts.

And for most of the slavery period, the inhumane and greedy slave plantation owners had little or no interest in the reproduction of their enslaved labourers.

As far as they were concerned, a slave was purchased as an investment and one capitalised on that investment by working the slave to death and then purchasing another.

It is not surprising therefore that such an authoritative eyewitness of the Barbadian slave society of the 1770s as Dr William Dickson (secretary to the Governor of Barbados) should inform us that he was: “Astonished to see some women far gone in their pregnancy, toiling in the field, and others whose naked infants lay exposed to the weather sprawling on a goat skin, or in a wooden tray… I have heard with indignation, drivers curse both them and their squalling brats, when they were suckling them”.

The Jamaican historian Orlando Patterson also informs us in his classic work, The Sociology of Slavery, that the enslaved mothers of newborns, faced with that type of hostile environment, often resorted to feeding their babies with a pap called “Parrada” – a mixture of bread, flour and sugar.

It is not surprising therefore that infant mortality among our enslaved fore-parents was so high that all West Indian slave colonies suffered from a failure to sustain their populations by natural increase.

So, we know from our history that the failure to provide an environment in which mothers are encouraged and facilitated to breastfeed their newborn children generated many negative consequences. And our history also tells us that the use of contrived and artificial baby foods such as “Parrada” – the slavery era equivalent of today’s baby formulas – resulted in unnecessary illnesses and deaths.

It is therefore high time for us to come to a fundamental national resolution to put that traumatic history behind us, and to determine that we, as a nation, will give our children the best possible start in life by affording them a minimum initial six-month period to facilitate exclusive breastfeeding and intimate mother and child bonding. And if we resolve so to do, then we must be committed to putting all the necessary supporting structures, regulations and policies in place.