Formula industry launches blog to defend marketing tactics
The Infant Formula Council has launched a new web site titled “Moms Feeding Freedom,” dedicated to defending hospital-based marketing of infant formula. Hosted by a corporate communications consultant, the site dismisses overwhelming scientific evidence that marketing bags undermine breastfeeding as “ridiculous.”
So far, moms online aren’t buying it. Responding to blog host Kate Kahn’s suggestion that moms are too smart to be swayed by a gift bag, one mother comments:
One meme of these formula-industry shills is that “women are too smart” to be swayed by advertising. Isn’t it ironic that this tired and deeply flawed rhetoric is being touted on a website that is nothing more than an extension of the formula industry’s advertising/lobbying efforts?
I guess they’re hoping that women aren’t nearly as smart as they are telling us we are.
The blog also rewrites the history of Gov. Mitt Romney’s political machinations to overturn a first-in-the-nation ban on hospital-based marketing. The Massachusetts Public Health Council voted to ban hospital-based marketing in December 2005. Gov. Romney subsequently scuttled the ban, replaced three vocal members of the Public Health Council, and prevented a vote on the issue in May 2006. One week later, he announced a multi-million dollar deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb to build a new manufacturing plant in Massachusetts. Bristol-Myers-Squibb is the parent company for Mead-Johnson, one of the two leading formula manufacturers in the US.
On the Moms Feeding Freedom web site, we learn that “after an outcry by moms who were offended that state officials were taking away their choice, the decision was reversed.” In fact, more than 3500 concerned citizens, including mothers, signed a petition urging Romney to uphold the ban. Dozens gathered at a Mother’s Day weekend protest, urging Romney to protect family values, not corporate profits.
They were joined by a broad coalition of health professionals, including the Massachusetts chapters of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, the American Public Health Association, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to its revisionist account of the Massachusetts formula bag regulation, the “Feeding Freedom” site urges support for a Massachusetts bill ironically titled “An act relative to maternity patients rights.” The bill, sponsored by Masschusetts Representative Harriet Stanley, is actually the Formula Company Marketing Bill of Rights. It asserts a patient’s right to formula samples and educational materials, potentially forcing hospitals to distribute marketing materials. This government mandated marketing is bad news for mothers and babies — and abridges every woman’s right to evidence-based, high-quality health care.
Don’t let big business rewrite history. Go to “Moms Feeding Freedom,” join the discussion groups, and help set the record straight. Hospitals should market health, and nothing else!
