Advancing women’s and children’s health rights, gender responsive budgeting and progressing the Australian National Breastfeeding Strategy in maternity care

Image by Catherine Constable

Despite authoritative health guidance emphasising that breastfeeding should be protected, supported and encouraged, the human rights of women and children to breastfeeding are violated through proliferation of maternity care barriers to breastfeeding, including unnecessary separation of newborns from mothers, and inappropriate promotion of commercial food products for mothers and infants and young children through health channels. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women and girls are suffering egregious violations of their human rights.

In times of health crisis and emergency, implementing the WHO/UNICEF Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding is more important than ever, but is hindered by lack of priority for investment in breastfeeding policies and plans nationally.

Our online workshop program aims to galvanise efforts to improve breastfeeding policies and funding in national budgets, by applying gender budgeting and World Breastfeeding Trends initiative (WBTi) tools to Australian policy. Our webinars on 20 April and 4 May took a global perspective on emergency and pandemic preparedness and response planning, in the Australian context.

The forthcoming webinar on Monday, 29 June will focus on Australian maternity services, to develop themes from the Introductory Webinar on 6 April on ‘Gender Responsive Budgeting and Progressing Breastfeeding Policy in 2020 and Beyond’, and the 18 May webinar on ‘Protecting Women’s Reproductive Rights in Policy and Resourcing decisions – the Need for ‘Data and Dollars’.

International and national experts in gender budgeting, human rights, food marketing, maternity care and midwifery, human milk banking and milk sharing, and breastfeeding support for incarcerated mothers, will provide informed commentary on addressing gender inequality through progressing implementation of the Australian National Breastfeeding Strategy.

Details for the next event on 27 July 2020 in this series is available here.

We acknowledge and thank the The Gender Institute, ANU for funding. We also appreciate the support of Save the Children UK, and the World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative, Breastfeeding Promotion Network Of India.