From the Bottle to the Grave: Realizing a Human Right to Breastfeeding Through Global Health Policy‪.‬

With millions dying each year from a lack of optimal feeding in the developing world, breastfeeding--the optimal form of infant and young child feeding--holds the potential to save more lives than any other public health intervention. Yet despite this unrivaled lifesaving potential, achievable at a comparatively minimal cost, international law has been unable to develop the global policies necessary to ensure the protection, promotion, and support of breastfeeding. As international law has faltered, human rights advocacy has been conspicuously absent in debates on this pressing public health issue. Although human rights scholarship has acknowledged public health as integral to the human right to health, it has rarely analyzed global breastfeeding policy. This dearth of breastfeeding scholarship transcends human fights specialties, with leading elaborations of health rights, (1) reproductive rights, (2) women's rights, (3) and children's rights (4) refraining from any significant discussion on this simple and obvious public health strategy for health promotion. In the absence of a scholarly foundation for human fights in breastfeeding policy, international law has wavered in addressing the global public health harms of breast milk substitute use in the developing world. (5) Analyzing the shortcomings of international law in addressing this pervasive threat from commercial infant formulas, this Article seeks to incorporate breastfeeding protection, promotion, and support pursuant to the international legal obligations of the human right to health, advancing these legal obligations through a rights-based approach to global breastfeeding policy.