Breastfeeding Made Easier when Returning to Work after Maternity
After having a baby returning to work after maternity leave offers many problems. Who takes care of the baby? Do you return to work full-time or part-time? Do you stop breastfeeding or put milk in a bottle?
Many mothers would love the opportunity to have their child at work and be able to breastfeed them from their own body. However, society and cultural norms have shunned this natural process. Surgeon General Regina M. Benjamin thought this was unacceptable, and issued a Call to Action to Support Breastfeeding.
This call to action is not just for women returning to work after maternity leave, but for women everywhere. Benjamin says how everyone can make breastfeeding for new mothers a more accepted and easier experience.
How? By recognizing your role in the community and helping:
- Communities should expand and improve programs that provide mother-to-mother support and peer counseling.
- Health care systems should ensure that maternity care practices provide education and counseling on breastfeeding.
- Hospitals should become more “baby-friendly,” by taking steps like those recommended by the UNICEF/WHO’s Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative.
- Clinicians should ensure they are trained to properly care for breastfeeding mothers and babies, promote breastfeeding to pregnant patients, and make sure that mothers receive the best advice on how to breastfeed.
- Employers should work toward establishing paid maternity leave and high-quality lactation support programs, and expand the use of programs that allow nursing mothers to have their babies close by so they can feed them during the day. They should also provide women with break time and private space to express breast milk.
- Families should give mothers the support and encouragement they need to breastfeed, including after her return to work or school.
According to an article on Care2.com, The Affordable Care Act includes a provision to help some breastfeeding mothers in the workplace. The law requires employers to provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child’s birth. The employer is not required to compensate an employee for such purpose. The employer must also provide a place — other than a bathroom — for the employee to express breast milk.
