The politics of breastfeeding: a feminist analysis of breastfeeding policies and promotion in Nigeria
Vera Oko

TL;DR
This paper analyzes how breastfeeding policies in Nigeria overlook the real-life challenges mothers face, often reinforcing gender inequality.
Contribution
The paper introduces a feminist and Ubuntu-informed critique of breastfeeding policies, highlighting contradictions between global ideals and local realities.
Findings
Global and Nigerian breastfeeding policies assume a universal positive experience, ignoring maternal challenges.
Exclusive breastfeeding is framed as ideal, marginalizing the difficulties many mothers encounter.
Structural gaps like poor social amenities and insufficient maternity leave reinforce gender inequalities.
Abstract
Since the 1990s, global health policies have prescribed breastfeeding as an ideal and primarily positive practice essential to child survival and maternal health. In Nigeria, infant feeding policies have largely drawn on these global frameworks in promoting exclusive breastfeeding as a strategy against infant mortality. Grounded in feminist ethics of care and the Ubuntu philosophy, this critique examines the contradictions between breastfeeding policies and maternal realities in Nigeria. The analysis identified the following: (1) a universalist approach in global and Nigerian breastfeeding policies that assumes breastfeeding is ideal and positively experienced by most mothers. (2) policies place breastfeeding at the top of the invisible hierarchy of infant feeding and pathologize quotidian maternal experiences by framing exclusive breastfeeding as ideal, and positive in most cases…
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsBreastfeeding Practices and Influences · Child Nutrition and Water Access · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare
