Breastfeeding women are primary food producers par excellence, delivering a custom-made product to fit the exact needs of a favoured clientele. The importance of breastmilk as a first food has been acknowledged in recent years by many states, which have taken measures to protect and encourage breastfeeding in acknowledgment of the World Health Organization’s 2002 Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding. Within both state and grassroots efforts to promote it, breastfeeding is often framed in terms of “rights,” though it is not always clear what these entail. This perspective article considers the role of breastmilk as a critical food for children that ensures their “right to the highest attainable standard of health” as articulated in Article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and interrogates mothers’ (and others’) role in providing it. While food studies, and even more so, food security scholarship and activism should incorporate breastfeeding scholarship, it should avoid the mistake of framing breastfeeding as a “choice” made by individual women. This article advocates incorporating breastfeeding into the right to food/food security agenda by explicitly supporting measures that increase women’s access to broader economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights. This, in turn, would put breastfeeding within reach, as an option, for more women. Thus breastfeeding becomes more likely and pressure is diverted from individual mothers and the often false ‘choice’ to breastfeed.

Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :

• Doonan, C., (2025), "Rights for whom? Linking baby’s right to eat with economic, social, and cultural rights for women", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v5i1.232)

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. breastfeeding
2. breastmilk
3. right to feed
4. right to food

Original publication: Doonan, Christina. "Rights for whom? Linking baby’s right to eat with economic, social, and cultural rights for women." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, pp. 8-18. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v5i1.232. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.