banthebags.org

Reporter Rachel Zimmerman reports that hospitals from Massachusetts to California are moving marketing out of maternity wards in Baby Goody Bags May Be On the Way Out.

“We would like every hospital in the country to stop giving out bags, but we’re approaching this in many different states on many different levels,” says Anne Merewood, co-chair of the Ban the Bags campaign launched last year in Massachusetts, and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine. “We’re not going to win it on grounds of breast-feeding alone; we’re going to win it on the grounds of not using hospitals for marketing.”

The Journal Article is summarized at kaisernetwork.org.

By Melissa Bartick, MD, MS
Chair, Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition

February, 2007 — In Massachusetts, getting hospitals to stop marketing baby formula became a battle of words fought in the press and in the corridors of the State House. In February 2006, then-Governor Mitt Romney directed our state’s Public Health Council to rescind the country’s first state regulation to ban hospital distribution of formula company discharge bags. Romney, his spokesman, and other opponents of the ban argued that women should be “free to choose” how they feed their babies, and that women should not be “forced” to breastfeed. Read more »

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is moving formula marketing out of city hospitals as part of a city-wide effort to support six months of exclusive breastfeeding, according to The New York Post.

Formula companies aren’t the only ones who co-opt health care providers to pitch expensive pharmaceutical products — read about how physicians are opting out of expensive meals from drug companies in the Washington Post.

Hold the Hors d’Oeuvres: Program Helps Doctors Stay Current Without Accepting Drugmakers’ Meals