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ABSTRACT
Ensuring working mothers' ability to breast-feed is crucial given that breast-feeding substantially reduces infant morbidity and mortality while promoting maternal health. Working conditions, rules on the job, supervisors and co-workers can all raise or lower barriers to breast-feeding. Around the world, 127 countries guarantee working women the right to breast-feed. Canada does not provide this assurance, despite the fact that the majority of infants are born to women in the labour force. This has profound implications for the health of infants and mothers alike. Solutions exist: extending current policies to ensure adequate maternity leave is available for all Canadians, legislating a right to breast-feed while working, and adapting workplaces to make this practical.
Key words: Breast-feeding; infant welfare; maternal welfare
La traduction du résumé se trouve à la fin de l'article. Can J Public Health 2009;100(5):381-83.
There are few opportunities like it: when the introduction of a readily feasible law would increase the public's choices and dramatically benefit health. But the opportunity to do the right thing about breast-feeding is one of them. The majority of North American mothers currently work both prior to and after giving birth, at a time when their babies' health and development would benefit substantially from breast-feeding.
Transformations in work and family lives
Men's work was transformed in North America between the 1800s and 1900s as it moved out of the home and the farm and into the industrial and post-industrial labour force. In Canada, nearly half the population worked in agriculture in 1881; by 1971, this had dwindled to less than 6%.1 The transformation of women's work in North America followed that of men. Fifty years ago, the majority of Canadian infants were born into homes where their mothers were not working outside of the household for pay. In Canada in 1959, less than 27% of women were in the labour force, including just under 18% of married women;2 by 2006, over 62% of females aged 15 and older were working outside the home.3
Women's participation in the labour force does not need to affect breast-feeding. Women who would like to return to work after a maternity leave are no less likely to breast-feed than women who do not intend to return to the paid labour force.4...