Formula Industry Urged Softer Campaign
By Marc Kaufman and Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writers –Friday, August 31, 2007
In an attempt to raise the nation’s historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples.
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign.
The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter (pdf), the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were “grateful” for his staff’s intervention to stop health officials from “scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding,” and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads…. (more at this link on the Washington Post Website – you may need to sign up for a free account to access the article.)
If the article link moves, just do a search using the title above. It’s well worth reading the full article!
I’d just like you to think about whether a woman is capable of making a decision if she is given all the information available on which to base that decision, even if the information is scary. Or whether as some people think, a woman should be protected from anything that might upset her or make her feel bad or worse that horrible “g” word (guilty). That decision should be up to big business and the men in her life??? Just wondering….
