Last Friday The Washington Post ran a front-page article slamming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for toning down a television campaign promoting breastfeeding following lobbying from the baby formula industry. The ads changed from scare tactic – one ad showed an insulin bottle topped by a nipple (highlighting a correlation between not breastfeeding and future diabetes) – to softer advertising that tried to highlight the positives of breastfeeding. Here’s my reaction, based on nearly a quarter-century doing public relations in Washington, DC: so what?

Let me be perfectly clear: I am an advocate for breastfeeding. My wife breastfed all of our children. It is clearly the healthiest choice, and I’m very thankful my wife did so. But, depending on what year you look at the data, only about 60 to 70 percent of new mothers attempt to breastfeed and, by the time their babies are six months old, the figure drops to 40 percent – at that age, less than 15 percent of mothers are only giving their babies breast milk. That means there are a whole lot of parents relying on baby formula. What ex-government official called what current government official aside, did we really need the federal government scaring the heck out of millions of mothers who do not breastfeed?

I can attest to this: parenting is scary enough. For new parents, it’s downright terrifying. (It doesn’t get any less scary, by the way, the older they get.) Did anybody ask whether it was appropriate to tell the millions of parents who are or who have fed their babies formula that they may have “given‿ their child diabetes? The Washington Post didn’t think that was a question to ask. In an online chat, Marc Kaufman, one of the authors of the story, said that “we found this story to be interesting and important because some HHS officials were working with real creativity to highlight the risks of not breast-feeding, and their efforts were often stymied. It seems to me that the breast-feeding campaign was trying to educate women – to give them information that would allow them to make informed choices – and that seems important to me.‿

Let me just suggest a new addition to the ethical standards that should guide all public health advertising campaigns: scaring the living daylights out of the parents of newborns, many of them at wit’s end simply due to the nature of the new addition in their homes, is not a good idea.

Breastfeeding – that’s very good.

Scaring parents of two-week old babies – not so good.

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