Understanding Lactation Justice
Lactation belongs everywhere families are.
Lactation Justice is the belief that every person deserves the autonomy, resources, care, and support necessary to make and carry out informed decisions about lactation and infant feeding, regardless of race, income, insurance status, geography, family structure, gender identity, or feeding outcome.
Inspired by the frameworks of Reproductive Justice and Birth Justice, Lactation Justice recognizes that feeding decisions do not happen in isolation. They are shaped by the conditions in which people live, give birth, work, parent, seek healthcare, and care for their families.
Reproductive Justice taught us to look beyond individual choice and ask whether people have the social, political, and economic conditions necessary to exercise that choice. Birth Justice brought that analysis into pregnancy, birth, and maternity care. Lactation Justice carries that understanding forward into the feeding journey.
At The Obsidian Milk Collective, Lactation Justice means looking beyond whether lactation care technically exists and asking deeper questions: Can families access it? Can they afford it? Is it culturally responsive? Are their feeding decisions respected? Are the professionals providing community-based care supported and fairly compensated? And are the systems responsible for maternal and infant health accountable for making equitable care possible?
Because access is not simply the existence of care. Justice requires the conditions that make meaningful access possible.
Lactation Justice Is About More Than Breastfeeding
Lactation Justice is not about achieving a particular feeding outcome or measuring success by how long someone breastfeeds, chestfeeds, pumps, or provides human milk.
It is about whether people have the conditions necessary to make informed feeding decisions and receive respectful, responsive care throughout their journey.
That means looking beyond individual behavior and examining the systems that shape lactation experiences; including healthcare, insurance, employment, childcare, transportation, public policy, family and community support, and access to skilled lactation care.
It also means recognizing that the ability to initiate or continue lactation is not determined by motivation alone. Structural barriers, financial constraints, discrimination, inadequate support, medical circumstances, separation, work requirements, and many other realities can influence what is possible for a family.
Lactation Justice does not prescribe what a family should choose.
It works to ensure that families have meaningful choices, and the resources, care, information, and support necessary to carry them out with dignity.
Why Do We Need Lactation Justice?
For generations, conversations about infant feeding have focused primarily on individual choice and personal responsibility. While individual decisions matter, they do not exist in isolation.
Lactation Justice recognizes that families make feeding decisions within the context of healthcare systems, public policies, workplace protections, economic realities, community resources, and lived experiences. When these systems create barriers, families often face challenges that extend far beyond motivation or education alone.
Rather than asking only how to improve breastfeeding rates, Lactation Justice invites us to ask deeper questions about the systems that shape those outcomes.
Lactation Justice asks:
Who has access to evidence-based lactation care, and who does not?
What barriers prevent families from meeting their feeding goals?
How do healthcare systems support or hinder lactation?
Who is represented in research, education, and policy?
What happens when a family’s lactation journey doesn’t follow the expected path?
How can communities, institutions, and policymakers better support every family’s right to informed feeding decisions?
Lactation Justice shifts the conversation from asking “Why aren’t families breastfeeding?” to asking, “What conditions are necessary for every family to achieve their own feeding goals?”
The Principles of Lactation Justice
Lactation Justice asks us to consider not only whether care and support exist, but whether people have the power, resources, protections, and conditions necessary to access them.
At OMC, our approach to Lactation Justice is grounded in the following principles:
Lactation Justice is guided by a set of core principles that shape how we provide care, develop policy, educate communities, and advocate for families. These principles recognize that equitable lactation support requires more than clinical knowledge. It requires systems that uphold dignity, autonomy, and opportunity for every family.
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Every person has the right to make informed decisions about lactation and infant feeding without coercion, shame, judgment, or pressure.
Lactation Justice respects the right to breastfeed, chestfeed, pump, combination feed, use formula, wean, or change feeding plans as circumstances and needs evolve.
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Every family deserves to be treated with compassion, respect, and humanity throughout their feeding journey. Care should honor lived experience, personal values, family structure, culture, and individual circumstances without requiring people to prove that they are deserving of support.
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Lactation Justice recognizes that families do not begin with the same resources, opportunities, protections, or access to care.
Equity requires identifying and addressing the structural conditions that create and sustain disparities, particularly those that disproportionately impact Black families and other historically marginalized communities.
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The existence of a service does not automatically make it accessible. Meaningful access requires care that families can reach, afford, understand, trust, and use when they need it.
This includes addressing barriers related to cost, insurance, transportation, geography, scheduling, language, disability, provider availability, and culturally responsive care.
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Families deserve care that recognizes and respects culture, identity, history, community knowledge, and lived experience.
Lactation Justice challenges practices that treat one experience of feeding, parenting, or family life as the universal standard.
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Lactation does not begin and end in the hospital. Families deserve access to information, care, and support across pregnancy, birth, postpartum, return to work, childcare, weaning, and other transitions throughout the feeding journey.
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Healthcare systems, insurers, employers, policymakers, institutions, and organizations all influence whether families can meaningfully exercise their feeding choices.
Lactation Justice requires these systems to examine and address the policies, practices, and gaps that create barriers to equitable care.
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Lactation exists within families, neighborhoods, workplaces, healthcare systems, and communities.
Sustainable change requires investing in community knowledge, trusted relationships, local leadership, and solutions developed with, not simply for, the people most impacted.
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Equitable access to lactation care requires sustainable systems of care. Families should not be denied care because they cannot afford it, and lactation professionals should not be expected to fill gaps in healthcare access through unpaid or unsustainable labor.
Lactation Justice invests in models that make care accessible for families while ensuring the professionals providing that care are fairly compensated, adequately resourced, and supported in sustaining their work.
Lactation Justice Follows Families Throughout Their Journey
Every lactation journey is different. Care and support should not begin or end at birth, nor should access depend on whether a family’s experience follows an expected path.
Lactation Justice recognizes that feeding experiences are shaped across pregnancy, birth, postpartum, work, family life, healthcare, and periods of transition or separation. Families deserve compassionate, evidence-based care that responds to where they are. Not where systems expect them to be.
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Access to evidence-based education, informed decision-making, and preparation that helps families understand their options before birth.
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Respectful maternity care, evidence-based feeding practices, informed consent, and early lactation support that protects autonomy and responds to each family’s goals and circumstances.
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Ongoing lactation care that extends beyond hospital discharge and remains accessible as feeding needs, health, and family circumstances change.
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Workplace protections, accommodations, time, privacy, and resources that allow lactating employees to express milk or otherwise continue pursuing their feeding goals without sacrificing their employment or economic security.
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Responsive lactation care for families navigating NICU stays, hospitalization, incarceration, military service, foster care, immigration-related separation, or other circumstances in which parent and baby may be apart.
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Lactation Justice recognizes and supports experiences that may fall outside traditional narratives of breastfeeding and postpartum care, including:
Pregnancy loss
Infant loss
Abortion
Exclusive pumping
Combination feeding
Formula use
Donor milk
Relactation
Induced lactation
Weaning
Gender-diverse parenting
Adoption and surrogacy
Every person deserves informed, compassionate care that respects their goals, circumstances, identity, and right to make decisions about their body and feeding journey.
Lactation Justice is not defined by how a family feeds. It is reflected in whether families have meaningful access to the information, resources, protections, and care necessary to make and carry out informed feeding decisions with dignity and autonomy.
Lactation belongs everywhere families are.
What Shapes Lactation?
Lactation and infant feeding do not happen in isolation.
A person’s ability to make and carry out feeding decisions is shaped by the conditions surrounding them—often long before they ever need lactation care.
These conditions may include:
Healthcare
Systems
Access to evidence-based maternity and lactation care, provider knowledge, respectful treatment, continuity of care, referral pathways, and the presence, or absence, of bias within healthcare settings.
Where lactation professionals and services are located, transportation options, travel distance, rural access, and whether virtual or community-based alternatives are available.
Family
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Community
The knowledge, beliefs, traditions, expectations, and practical support surrounding a family, as well as access to trusted community-based resources.
Insurance
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Affordability
Geography
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Transportation
Whether lactation care, breast pumps, supplies, donor milk, and other necessary services are covered, affordable, and available without creating financial hardship.
Childcare
&
Education
Whether childcare providers and educational settings understand, accommodate, safely handle, and support human milk and the needs of lactating families.
Life
Circumstances
Health, disability, mental well-being, housing stability, immigration status, incarceration, family separation, loss, safety, caregiving responsibilities, and other realities that may influence what feeding options are available or sustainable.
Policy
&
Law
The laws, regulations, institutional policies, and public investments that determine what protections exist, who qualifies for them, and whether those protections are meaningfully enforced.
Work
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Economic Stability
Paid leave, workplace protections, scheduling flexibility, pumping accommodations, job security, wages, and whether maintaining lactation requires choosing between feeding goals and financial stability.
Culture, Racism
&
Historical Context
The histories and systems that shape how lactation is understood, supported, discouraged, or experienced, including the lasting impact of racism, reproductive oppression, medical mistreatment, and the exploitation of Black women's reproductive and lactation labor.
Lactation Justice asks us to look beyond individual choices and outcomes and examine the conditions in which those choices are made.
When we focus only on what an individual did or did not do, we risk holding families responsible for barriers created by systems around them.
Lactation Justice in Action
At The Obsidian Milk Collective, Lactation Justice is more than a framework for understanding inequity. It shapes how we provide care, build programs, develop partnerships, engage communities, and advocate for systems change.
Putting Lactation Justice into action means addressing immediate barriers while also working to change the conditions that create those barriers in the first place.
That can look like helping a family access lactation care they could not otherwise afford, creating pathways to culturally responsive community-based care, educating families about their rights,strengthening connections between healthcare and community providers, advocating for better insurance coverage and workplace protections, or challenging policies and practices that contribute to inequitable outcomes.
It also means building solutions that are sustainable. Expanding access should not require families to bear costs they cannot afford or community-based providers to absorb the cost of filling gaps left by larger systems.
We believe meaningful change happens when direct care, education, community leadership, partnership, advocacy, and policy work move together.
Lactation Justice asks us not only to respond when a family encounters a barrier, but to ask why that barrier exists, and what must change so fewer families encounter it in the future.
Our LATCH Framework
The LATCH Framework guides how The Obsidian Milk Collective puts Lactation Justice into practice.
Through Learn, Access, Thrive, Connect, and Honor, we address both the immediate needs of families and the broader conditions that shape lactation experiences.
Learn
Knowledge supports informed decision-making.
We provide evidence-based, accessible education that helps families understand lactation, infant feeding, their options, and their rights, without shame, coercion, or judgment.
No family should have to navigate lactation alone.
We strengthen connections among families, community-based providers, healthcare systems, birth workers, organizations, and other trusted sources of care and support.
Access
Connect
Care should be available in ways families can actually use.
We work to reduce financial, geographic, insurance, transportation, and other barriers to skilled lactation care while expanding pathways to community-based support.
Thrive
Lactation exists within the health and well-being of the whole person and family.
We support care that recognizes physical health, emotional well-being, changing circumstances, and the many factors that influence whether families can pursue their feeding goals.
Honor
Every lactation journey carries knowledge, history, and lived experience.
We honor the autonomy, stories, cultures, choices, and experiences of families while recognizing the generations of Black women whose reproductive and lactation labor, resistance, knowledge, and care have shaped the history that informs our work today.
The Black Lactation Bill of Rights
Lactation Justice requires us to recognize that inequity is not experienced equally.
Black families have navigated generations of reproductive oppression, medical racism, exploitation of Black women’s reproductive and lactation labor, inequitable access to healthcare, and systems that have too often disregarded their autonomy, knowledge, and experiences.
The Black Lactation Bill of Rights affirms the rights Black families should be able to expect throughout pregnancy, birth, lactation, infant feeding, healthcare, employment, childcare, and community life.
These rights include the right to:
Make informed feeding decisions free from coercion, shame, or judgment.
Receive respectful, culturally responsive, evidence-based lactation care.
Have feeding goals and concerns taken seriously by healthcare professionals.
Receive accurate information about breastfeeding, chestfeeding, pumping, human milk, donor milk, supplementation, and formula.
Access skilled lactation care regardless of income, insurance status, or geography.
Receive continuity of lactation care beyond hospital discharge.
Receive appropriate lactation support during separation from an infant, including hospitalization, NICU admission, incarceration, foster care, immigration-related separation, or other circumstances.
Have human milk safely accepted, stored, and provided in childcare and educational settings.
Receive reasonable workplace accommodations, time, privacy, and protections necessary to express milk without jeopardizing employment or economic security.
Receive compassionate lactation care following pregnancy loss, infant loss, abortion, or other reproductive experiences.
Access lactation care that respects gender identity, family structure, culture, and lived experience.
Change feeding plans, supplement, wean, or discontinue lactation without shame or judgment.
Have pain, supply concerns, infant feeding difficulties, and other lactation concerns appropriately assessed rather than dismissed.
Receive referrals and connections to additional care when needs extend beyond the scope of a lactation professional.
Have privacy, informed consent, and bodily autonomy respected throughout lactation care.
Be heard, believed, and included in decisions about the care they and their families receive.
These rights are not special privileges.
They reflect the dignity, autonomy, access, respect, and quality of care that Black families have always deserved.
Our Commitment to Lactation Justice
At The Obsidian Milk Collective, we believe Lactation Justice requires more than increasing breastfeeding rates or expanding the number of services available.
It requires creating the conditions in which people can make informed decisions about their bodies and feeding journeys, access the care and resources they need, and have those decisions respected.
As a Black-led organization, we remain intentional about confronting the inequities that disproportionately impact Black families while building solutions that strengthen access to lactation care across Alabama.
Our commitment extends beyond individual care. We work toward healthcare systems that are accountable, policies that protect families, workplaces and communities that make lactation possible, and community-based care that is adequately resourced and sustainable.
Because equitable access should not depend on families being able to afford care—or providers being able to afford to give it away.
That is Lactation Justice.
Honoring the Movements That Inform This Work
Lactation Justice does not exist in isolation.
Our understanding of this work is deeply informed by the movements and frameworks that have long challenged us to think beyond individual choice and examine the conditions that shape people’s ability to exercise autonomy, raise families, and live with dignity.
Reproductive Justice
We honor the Black women who created the Reproductive Justice framework in 1994 and the generations of Black women, women of color, organizers, advocates, and communities who have continued to build and advance this movement.
Reproductive Justice expanded the conversation beyond legal rights and individual choice to include the social, political, and economic conditions necessary for people to make meaningful decisions about their bodies, reproduction, families, and lives.
Its framework reminds us that having a right is not the same as having the resources, safety, access, and power necessary to exercise that right.
Birth Justice
We also honor the Birth Justice movement and the birth workers, organizers, advocates, and communities who have challenged inequity, racism, coercion, mistreatment, and preventable harm within pregnancy, birth, and maternity care.
Birth Justice reminds us that respectful care, bodily autonomy, informed consent, cultural responsiveness, and community knowledge are essential, not optional, to equitable maternal care.
Carrying the Work Forward
Lactation Justice draws inspiration from these movements while focusing specifically on the conditions surrounding lactation and infant feeding.
It asks what autonomy, equity, access, dignity, and justice require after pregnancy and birth, through postpartum recovery, feeding, pumping, work, childcare, healthcare, family life, separation, loss, weaning, and the many other circumstances that shape a lactation journey.
At The Obsidian Milk Collective, we offer Lactation Justice not as a replacement for the movements that inform it, but as a continuation of their call to examine systems, center those most impacted by inequity, protect bodily autonomy, and build conditions in which families can thrive.