DURHAM – Durham is dubbed “the City of Medicine” but lacked a “baby-friendly” hospital until 2024.

“…And that made me feel really angry,” Love Anderson, one of the founders of Breastfeed Durham told The Tribune. At the time, robust lactation support was only available in Chapel Hill. 

The World Health Organization’s Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative began in 1991 to promote and support breastfeeding on a structural and institutional scale. The program established 10 steps of the best practices backed by research to increase breastfeeding. Through BD’s efforts and coalition building, Durham was proclaimed a Breastfeeding Family Friendly Community in 2024.

Breastfeed Durham was established in 2018 as a nonprofit to help create equitable lactation support and nutrition justice.

“I felt like everybody knew somebody who had lost a Black baby that year,” Anderson said. “I had high school students who also had kids, and I really wanted to pay it forward for them and my grandchildren.”

As a biracial woman, Anderson experienced bias from people whenever she breastfed her dark-skinned child. “We wanted to make sure that we were going to create a breastfeeding friendly community that was for Black women,” Anderson said.

Following the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, Black women told the team they felt unsafe breastfeeding. “Most of the time, the reason people are asked to cover up when breastfeeding is discrimination, including gender discrimination,” she said. 

According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Service’s 2024 Infant Mortality Report, 315 Black infant deaths per 1,000 live births statewide, compared to 266 deaths for each 1,000 white births occurred.

The World Health Organization recommends that exclusively breastfeeding is the best for infant optimal growth and development. The benefits between the parent and infant are mutual, Anderson said. 

“Milk directly from the breast or chest is antimicrobial, it’s antibacterial, it improves your immune system, it helps decrease blood pressure,” Anderson said. “But it’s really hard to do that if you’re back at work; if you have separation.”

North Carolina boasts leadership in lactation equity, as Carrboro was the first town to achieve the designation of being a BFFC, and Durham was the first county to do so. 

Breastfeed Durham’s Family and Pregnancy Expo engaged families with over 30 vendors, public and nonprofit resources for healthcare, legal aid, housing and more at Hillside Park. It was sponsored by Carolina Birth and Wellness, Durham County Department of Public Health, Durham County Early Childhood Coordinator and Family Care, PA. 

“…We’d done a fundraiser every year that was a gala inside a place that’s fancy, we raised money,” Anderson said. “It’s not really who we are, and given everything that’s happened in the nation this year, getting together in fancy dresses didn’t feel like the right thing to do.”

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