Lactation non-profits and the ethical lactation medicine of the future
The world’s dominant lactation non-profits are historically embedded in unconscious or conscious beliefs about purity
The La Leche League in the United States was responsible for the foundation of IBLCE in 1985. The 'I' in the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners (IBLCE) was originally solely upheld by a single international presence in addition to the founders from the La Leche League, Australia’s pioneering breastfeeding advocate, Maureen Minchin.
Maureen is now a white-haired, articulate and intelligent octagenarian, who uses a walking stick but whose historian’s mind remains agile and very particular about the facts. At the table in 1985 in the US, Maureen strongly recommended that the new professional body for the new discipline of 'lactation consultants' took on an international identity. Maureen tells me that she was also the one who strongly advocated to have compliance with the WHO Code structured into IBLCE’s regulations. Today, in 2026, Maureen is appalled by the exclusion of researchers and researcher-clinicians from the education of lactation medicine doctors and IBCLCs. This, she states, is wrong, and means that our clinicians are simply unable to access the best quality of education, which affects the quality of care available to women and their babies.
She was right, back then in the 1980s, that there were - and there still are - critically important reasons to advocate for strict regulation of the marketing practices of formula companies. However, the WHO International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes is not designed to make recommendations on the complex matter of research funding, which is regulated under Conflict of Interest protocols in place by receiving organisations (e.g. universities), according to internationally agreed best practice.
Since 1985, IBLCE has had a global monopoly on the certification and education of what they named International Board Certified Lactation Consultants. They boast of 39,000 IBCLCs worldwide now, all contributing financially year after year to maintain compulsory membership.
The world's dominant lactation non-profits invest substantial resource in policing their own interpretation of the WHO Code but do not have effective processes for ensuring research-based, high quality education
Although you might think a lactation non-profit as big as this would be investing large amounts of resources into ensuring quality of research-based education, in fact the quality assurance by IBLCE is predominantly focussed on whether or not an educator is perceived to comply with the WHO Code, which has resulted in the world-wide flourishing of non-evidence-based lactation education and the worsening overdiagnosis, paramedicalisation, and overtreatment of breastfeeding women and their infants.
This is the same for the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, founded in 1994: it’s guidelines for endorsement of conferences, for instance, focuses entirely on perceived WHO Code compliance. ABM endorsement does not attest to quality of education or track record of the educators.
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