Breast-feeding moms aim for Guinness

First they had to fight in court for their cause. Now they just want to keep the advocacy “flowing” by breaking world records.

Breast-feeding advocates in the country, with the help of thousands of mothers, are again aiming for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records with last Thursday’s event dubbed “Sabay-Sabay Sumuso sa Nanay (Suckle together).”

Around a hundred participants with their respective babies filled a room at Marikina City Convention Center, the central site among the 1,000 venues set up nationwide to produce the most number of mothers breastfeeding simultaneously in multiple locations.

The project, organized by Nurturers of the Earth, Church of God International and UNTV, was an attempt to break the record set also by Nurturers on May 2, 2007, when it registered 15,128 breast-feeding moms in 295 sites across the country. Parañaque City hosted the central site of the 2007 event.

“We’re confident that we can break it. We are expecting more than 30,000 participants, ” said Dr. Elvira Lichauco Henares-Esguerra, founding chair of Nurturers, which calls itself a support group for natural lifestyle and natural parenting in the Philippines. She is also a fellow in the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine in New York.

Guinness representatives could confirm in about three weeks whether a new record had indeed been set, Esguerra added.

Successful or not, the Oct. 24 activity could already be considered a strong statement coming from advocates like Esguerra, who years ago had to wage a legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court against the infant formula industry.

In October 2007, the high tribunal upheld sections of the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of the 1986 National Milk Code which bar infant formula companies from making false or exaggerated claims about their product.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), which then lauded the ruling, examples of these “unethical ads” are claims that infant formula can increase a child’s intelligence.

The same SC ruling, however, lifted the Department of Health’s total ban on infant formula ads, which milk companies represented by the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Association of the Philippines opposed for undermining the public’s right to information and freedom to choose between breast milk and its substitutes.

During the SC hearings, Esguerra recalled, “four things happened: Our group was offered P200 million to keep quiet; Wyeth sold contaminated milk (which the government ordered recalled); our lawyer was murdered and an assassin was sent to kill the one who replaced him, and there was foreign intervention.”

At one point, she said, even the president of the American Chamber of Commerce approached then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to lobby for the infant formula companies.