Ethical Issues in Breastfeeding and Lactation Interventions: A Scoping Review.
Supriya Subramani, Rasita Vinay, Julian W März and 2 others
PMID 38087449WHAT IT FOUND
Breastfeeding intervention ethics literature centres on maternal autonomy, informed counselling, stigma, health messaging, financial incentives, and children's rights.
Most interventions target education rather than environmental support. The review maps themes, not effects.
Key findings
01The included articles were analysed under six ethical themes: maternal autonomy and experiences, counselling and informed consent, evidence and effectiveness, health communication, financial incentives, and children's right to breastmilk.
02Most reviewed interventions focused on education and counselling rather than environmental support for lactating people.
03The review found a gap in specific ethical frameworks for breastfeeding and lactation interventions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The review did not appraise the quality of the 26 included studies. Most included articles were conceptual or ethical analyses, not intervention trials, so the paper maps discourse rather than tested effects. The search required explicit engagement with ethics and excluded articles that mentioned ethics only as research ethics approval, author affiliation, or unrelated breastfeeding content. Only English-language articles were included. The search strategy used cisnormative language and did not include chestfeeding or bodyfeeding terms. This limited relevance to transgender and gender non-conforming parents. Ethical themes were interpreted by the review team, with disagreements resolved by the first author. The review covered literature from January 1990 to October 2022.
Declared interests
The Family Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation funded a consultancy project to develop ethical guidelines for breastfeeding and lactation interventions. The first author and other named authors were funded through that consultancy, and one author is employed by the foundation. The authors state that the funder did not direct the method, analysis, interpretation, writing, or submission decisions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that breastfeeding counselling, ethical frameworks, or incentives improve breastfeeding or infant outcomes. The paper maps ethical themes from the included articles, most of which were conceptual analyses, and did not appraise study quality.