Soon after news broke that the British government is considering paying women to breastfeed their newborn babies, we learn that our own government places less emphasis on mothers nursing their infants. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has prevented a female asylum seeker, who gave birth via a caesarean one week ago, from remaining overnight with her ill newborn baby in hospital in Brisbane. Among other things the decision effectively thwarts the mother’s ability to breastfeed her child.
Aside from the emotional trauma this enforced separation causes, the Department’s decision will effectively prevent the mother from establishing breastfeeding during the critical week after childbirth when her milk arrives. Expressing milk is an alternative, but it is difficult to imagine any asylum seekers being provided with breast pumps while in detention, and the appropriate means to store and transport expressed milk. In any case, expressing milk is very difficult unless a milk supply is effectively established: something that naturally occurs when a mother is able to breastfeed her newborn baby around the clock.
Breast milk is a magical substance and hugely valuable towards achieving positive public health outcomes, as the Brits have duly recognised. According to the Australian Breastfeeding Association (which celebrates 50 years in 2014): “… premature weaning increases the risk of gastrointestinal illness, respiratory illness and infection, eczema… with increasing scientific evidence of its links with chronic or serious illnesses or conditions such as childhood diabetes, urinary tract infection, certain types of cancers, diseases of the digestive system such as coeliac disease and Crohn’s disease, liver disease and cot death”.
Breast milk is incredibly important for newborn babies in critical care, as it contains powerful antibodies that cannot be replicated in even the most advanced artificial formulas. Breast milk is critical towards assisting ill newborns to be well enough to leave hospital. And of course, healthier babies and mothers mean less pressure on our public health system and subsequent savings for taxpayers.
Breastfeeding is the cheapest and healthiest way to feed a newborn baby. Allowing the asylum seeker mother to sleep beside her newborn in hospital and freely breastfeed is the most fiscally logical, as well as compassionate, choice.