Milk

BIRDS CHIRPING

MUSIC

MUSIC

I know you can hear everyone talking.

We're all talking about you.

You're like the centre of attention.

MUSIC

It's a great feeling to know that you can have another life

inside of you, that you have the ability to create a being.

To feel the movements of the baby and the kicks and,

you know, actually seeing them for yourself and feeling them,

it's a great feeling.

I feel somewhat of a superwoman, to know that I

can create a miniature, so to speak, of me, you know.

Keep going, keep going, keep going

Push, push, push, push, push, push.

SOBBING

Push, push, push, push, push, push

Keep going, keep going, keep going

From the very beginning of life,

the mom and the baby should be together.

MUSIC

They should have a strong foundation,

build their confidence, their capacity and power,

to feed the future with their enormous wealth,

which is God-given

and it is not only food,

but it is also medicine, which is breastfeeding.

And we always hope that they will give what is

the innate power of their resources.

It should not be the corporate greed

that should feed the future,

but it should be the mothers.

Look at the whole issue of child survival,

MUSIC

What families go through when they lose a child

and the joy they have when their children

are able to grow strong and healthy.

MUSIC

The individual child has lifelong benefits

benefits we cannot deny this child

benefits, as countries of the world, we must protect.

SOBBING, BABY CRYING

BIRDS CHIRPING

SOBBING

MUSIC

I'm excited because I know that the time is coming.

I'm getting very prepared

and I just feel that in a couple of weeks,

maybe two or three, that will be the time.

But I can't really foretell the future because you never know.

You might say one thing and then something else happens.

I'm preparing myself to stand up.

I'm currently writing my birth plan,

how I want the process to go.

I'm going to tell them I want this, I don't want this,

and I want them to follow that,

because they still have to do their job,

and I still have to do my job.

At the end of the day, it's how I feel,

and it's how comfortable I want to be,

so I'm going to be very demanding.

So I have: My name is Kela McClean

and I wish to be with my mother

during the process, just me and her,

and I plan to have a natural birth.

I wish to breastfeed as soon as possible after birth.

Yeah... that's all I have so far.

And then there's another one.

I just hope everything goes how I envisioned it to go.

I decided beforehand that I was going to bottle feed,

for a number of reasons.

One, I had a breast reduction when I was 23

and I was told at the time that

I may not be able to breastfeed.

And I knew that at the time, and I've known that since,

and that's always kind of-- it's always been in my head,

so maybe I had adjusted my thoughts a long time ago

and I just always knew

that was what my experience was going to be.

Cohen. Here.

I didn't feel for me personally and for my family,

it was the best decision for us.

My husband has not been around a lot of children

before we were pregnant.

I knew that he would need to have some good quality time

with his son, without feeling like he's being watched,

without other people around,

and I think bottle-feeding would give him that experience.

I also know that I need time away,

I need time away from my son, I need time away from my husband,

I need time for myself.

My husband and I are able

to continue to develop our own relationship

outside of just the two of us with our son.

I did a lot of research before I made my decision.

I did read about the benefits of breastfeeding.

When I weighed the benefits versus

some of the downfalls,

it was still a decision I felt confident about for my family.

Every child has a right to basic nutrition.

Nutrition is a gift that every government

must give to their children and protect it.

BIRDS CHIRPING

Prevention is better than cure. It is also cheaper.

Look at the long-term benefits.

This is lifelong and this we cannot deny our children.

MUSIC

Since 1948, when WHO was established,

the number of deaths in the world

have been dramatically reduced.

But there's been a bit of a shift in the

type of deaths that we see now.

We have seen a reduction of the deaths

due to infectious diseases,

but now we see more deaths from chronic diseases.

A lot of the children under five don't make it.

There are many ways to stop this epidemic.

One of them is really starting good nutrition

from very early in life.

That was at the district hospital, I would see

many babies coming in malnourished, with diarrhoea.

When we would go into the root cause,

it was all about bottle feeding and artificial feeding.

So I really looked at it and said this I must address

in order to promote child survival and development.

Good nutrition is a preventive measure throughout the life,

but particularly the first period of life,

since conception.

Good nutrition starts with early initiation of breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding should be initiated

in the first hour of life.

The way it reduces child mortality is amazing,

in terms of not only proportions, but numbers.

Many countries now are struggling now

with childhood obesity.

Many countries are struggling with diabetes

at very early ages, earlier than ever before in history,

and look at the cancers.

Why?

Because they have never protected breastfeeding.

Doctors, health workers, do not get good training in nutrition,

and particularly infant nutrition.

That's something which is missing in medical curricula,

is not receiving the right attention,

and we would need to have better-trained health workers.

They studied medicine, but they have never studied fully

the first food of humanity, which is breastfeeding.

They were not taught about the recent formula milk-feeding,

about re-lactation, about how to preserve

express breast milk, if you are working.

There's the lack of support from the obstetricians,

a lack of education on the nurses' parts

and the doctors' parts in the hospitals after the birth,

and what often determines that they have problems

is how many interventions we have during labour

and birth, which cause problems with breastfeeding.

And then when they run into all these problems--

sore nipples, the baby doesn't take the breast,

the baby's not taking enough milk from the breast,

the baby's got colic-- the answer to everything is:

Just give the baby formula.

And it's not surprising how many mothers

have difficulty with breastfeeding.

There are clinics in many cities that help mothers.

The problem with some of these clinics is that

there's a wide variety of people in the breastfeeding clinics,

some of them have just the very basics and

they don't know how to deal with difficult problems.

I'm here today after having gone to three

different lactation consultants and doctors

and nurses and getting the advice from breastfeeding

clinics prior to even having the baby.

I've received a lot of confusing and conflicting information,

so I've gotten to the point when I've become quite frustrated

with all of that and trying all these different

things that nothing really seems to make sense.

I had been trying a lot of the techniques that I was told

to use and that should work,

and I was feeling in my gut that something is still not right.

Something that's so critical to a newborn's very survival,

feeding, we're not trained to know anything about it.

It's across the board,

anybody dealing with a breastfeeding mother.

We're all undereducated in this area.

We say and do and talk about things

that are not evidence based. In the end,

we destroy mothers and their breastfeeding.

We undermine them. We disempower them.

SCREAMS

Really, we should trust the mother's body

to know what to do with birth.

We should trust that it's going to go well, for the most part.

However, when the baby comes out,

all of a sudden we don't trust the mother's body anymore.

Now we must overregulate it.

We must put it into rules, we must say:

Oh no no no, you must follow these rules,

you must do it this way.

Whatever happened to the trusting of the body?