Public Health and Penal Abolitionism: the National Breastfeeding Campaign exposing the problem.

Abstract

This article analyzes the exclusion of incarcerated women from public policies and national campaigns aimed at supporting breastfeeding, highlighting this omission as part of the racial logic that guides the organized abandonment by the State. Although breastfeeding is widely recognized as important for the health of the baby, the lactating person, and the planet, the conditions of the prison system make it impossible to guarantee this right. Prison, marked by racial and punitive logics, is incompatible with the care and bonding practices involved in human breastfeeding. We analyze the absence and presence in the production of regulations and public policies in the fields of public health and law, respectively, problematizing the distribution of attention to breastfeeding for people deprived of liberty between these fields from the radical critical notion of the modern subject of law mobilized by Denise Ferreira da Silva. In this way, we demonstrate how this exclusion is not due to an administrative failure, but to a structural dynamic of the State, which operates to maintain incarceration as a tool for racial, social, and gender control. Based on the abolitionist feminist perspectives of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, we propose that addressing breastfeeding issues in prison requires more than just piecemeal adjustments; it demands a rethinking of society as a whole. The abolitionist perspective offers a critical view that denounces the inadequacy of prisons to guarantee fundamental rights and points to the urgent need for decarceration as a condition for promoting comprehensive public health.