Lactation Newsmakers: Elaine Petitat-Côté: Making Good Use of Two UN Conventions to Advocate for Breastfeeding Rights

Elaine Petitat-Côté was born in Canada and has lived for the greatest part of her life in Geneva. She has consistently worked with development, health, and women's organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), advocating for a public health approach to medicine that considers the social and economic realities of communities, and emphasizes the creation of healthy living conditions to ensure long-term, sustainable health outcomes This perspective supports a horizontal approach to medicine, in contrast to the narrower, vertical approach typically employed. As a member of the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN) she worked for the Geneva Infant Feeding Association (GIFA) on two main issues related to breastfeeding: maternity protection at work, and the rights of children to the highest attainable standard of health and nutrition, in particular by protecting breastfeeding. In this article, she explains her work at IBFAN-GIFA as it focused on the adoption and implementation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 183 and Recommendation 191 on maternity protection. She also explains how she was able to use the review process built into the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to develop a rights-based approach to promote, protect, and support breastfeeding and make way to improving the legal, social, and institutional situation of breastfeeding in all countries examined by the Committee on the rights of the child.