Women vulnerable due to lack of diversity in breastfeeding images, says Coseley mum
Lou Oliver's making an image bank of infant feeding in diverse families
A mum from Coseley is on a mission to change the way infant feeding is portrayed.
Lou Oliver - an NHS community support worker - grew tired of only seeing a small sample of women in imagery and adverts of breastfeeding.
"The idea is that by having a much broader range of imagery out there, of parents feeding their babies breastmilk, that the many women and parents out there realise that actually breastfeeding doesn’t have to be that typical white, middle-class, white shirt, M&S, sort of advert stereotype that we see," she says.
She started Diversity in Infant Feeding, and put out calls to volunteers she could photograph.
"People like younger parents, older parents, parents with babies who need to be tube fed, parents with babies who have disabilties, or babies with disabilties, there’s a whole plethora of different variants there, and we aim to increase that representation," she explains.
One of the aims of the initiative is to empower people.
"We were contacted by someone who wasn’t a parent who used a wheelchair, and she said she had somehow always doubted that she could be the mother she wanted to be, and feed her baby, and be a good parent, because she had never seen parents in wheelchairs in any imagery, and said that this had really given her hope and confidence," says Lou.
Another goal of the project is to make sure women are receiving equal medical care across the board.
"If we don’t have diverse images within say medical books, we risk putting certain groups at increased risk of complications, because our health professional can’t diagnose mastitius on brown breasts, because all of the medical books have mastitis symptoms on white breasts," she says.
There are already hundreds of photos in the images bank, with it due to launch in the coming months.