Window into a mother's world

By REBECCA WALSH

A dozen women with babies clutched to their breasts relax to the soothing sounds of a string quartet as office workers hurry down Queen St.

Surrounded by contemporary New Zealand artwork and seated in luxuriously deep black leather chairs in the glass-enclosed foyer of the Royal & SunAlliance, one of Auckland's smartest corporate buildings, the mothers launched World Breastfeeding Week.

They chose the building in downtown Auckland for its visibility and to emphasise the fact there is no national policy on breastfeeding in workplaces.

World Breastfeeding Week is also being promoted by posters featuring former Xena star Lucy Lawless breastfeeding her son Judah Miro Tapert, while perched on the side of a chair wearing fishnet stockings and a little black dress.

The heading reads: Breastfeeding - my best role ever.

Research shows breastfed babies have fewer childhood illnesses and fewer hospital admissions than babies who are artificially fed.

But Sian Burgess, breastfeeding advocate for Women's Health, said returning to work was one of the most common reasons women gave for not breastfeeding.

Companies such as Microsoft in the United States provided quiet, comfortable spaces for mothers to breastfeed, but in New Zealand employers tended to develop ad hoc arrangements, if they did anything at all.

Ms Burgess wants the Government to extend paid parental leave to include paying mothers for feeding breaks until a baby is six months old.

"If you are a smoker you can have a five-minute break every hour ... That's two 20-minute breastfeeding breaks a day. So while we enable smoking, which is not healthy and life-affirming, we don't enable breastfeeding, which is."

New Zealand research has found that 98 per cent of pregnant women want to breastfeed, but at six months less than 7 per cent of babies are exclusively breastfed.

The Ministry of Health will this year launch its Breastfeeding Action Plan, identifying current breastfeeding rates and recommending targets for babies aged six weeks, three months and six months.

Ms Burgess said it was not only in workplaces that improvements were needed. Although there was greater acceptance of mothers breastfeeding in public, there was still some hesitancy about it.

"Breastfeeding tends to be invisible because people don't see it happening commonly," she said.

"For every image of a breastfeeding woman we see 200 of babies being bottle-fed.

"The commonest breastfeeding image we see is of a black woman in famine conditions with a starving baby. We don't see healthy, well-looking women breastfeeding."