GREENSBORO, NC The Center for Women’s Health & Wellness at UNCG and The Center for Infant & Young Child Feeding & Care at UNC Chapel Hill are jointly sponsoring the third annual Breastfeeding & Feminism Symposium Sept. 24-25 in Chapel Hill.

The symposium Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice will be held at the William & Ida Friday Center for Continuing Education.

Organizers hope to strengthen cooperation among breastfeeding advocates and those concerned with contraception, abortion, workers’ rights, mother’ rights, adequate health insurance, women’s economic advancement and public health.

This symposium aims to re-position breastfeeding as an issue of women’s reproductive health, rights and justice, said Paige Hall Smith, PhD, director of the Center for Women’s Health and Wellness.

Many scholars have conceived of breastfeeding as a practice that constrains women from achieving social and economic gains, while breastfeeding programs have not necessarily included the needs of mothers. It has been viewed as a choice rather than a rights or health issue. Breastfeeding should not result in any loss of security, rights or privileges to which women are entitled.

Miriam Labbok, MD, MPH, Director of the Center for Infant & Young Child Feeding & Care in UNC’s School of Public Health, noted, “This will also be an opportunity to identify areas of synergy between the interests of those dedicated to breastfeeding and those dedicated to other aspects of women’s reproductive health, with the intent to strengthen the call for increased social and political commitment to both.”

Presentations at the symposium will include:

• New Breast Milk in Old Bottles: Recreating Motherhood and Rethinking Breastfeeding, Barbara Katz Rothman, PhD, Professor of Sociology, City University of New York;

• The Power of Women’s Stories: Helping Women Make Decisions for Themselves and Their Babies, Judy Norsigian, DrHL Honoris Causa, director, Our Bodies Ourselves (the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective);

• Fertility and Family Planning in the Reproductive Health Continuum, Herbert B. Peterson, MD, Chair, Department of Maternal & Child Health, School of Public Health, UNC;

• Got Milk? Not in Public! Jacqueline H. Wolf, PhD, Assoc. Prof., Ohio University, author of Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Century;

• Diversity, Health, and Breastfeeding, Barbara Pullen-Smith, MPH, Director, North Carolina Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities.

The registration fee is $200, $75 for full-time students. The registration form is available online. For more information, contact Paige Smith - (336) 334-4735.