by Catherine Hine
“I needed additional breastfeeding support, a community midwife came to me and spent nearly 2 hours giving me support, which I am grateful for.” (Black British African, Aged 26-35)
There should be nothing remarkable about this statement. As Five x More’s 2025 Black Maternity experiences Report demonstrates, the lived experience of Black women across the UK too often falls short of the standard experienced by non-Black women. It emphasises the ongoing need for system change.
This report – building on the striking findings of Five x More’s first in 2022 – includes positive testimonies like the one above. It shows that many of the 1,100+ Black women who responded to the campaign’s survey are actively self-advocating to improve the quality and relevance of the care they receive. However, many still report poor treatment and discrimination throughout their perinatal journeys.
As BfN Director Dr. Ernestine Gheyoh Ndzi and I reported last year, there is ongoing work across BfN to examine how power and privilege show up in our own practices. Left unchallenged, these dynamics perpetuate the deep-rooted health inequalities faced by Black and minoritised families during their maternity experience.
Our five-year strategy puts tackling inequalities in breastfeeding support at its heart, and we are committed to listening, understanding, and meaningfully responding to the unique needs of Black and minoritised women – recognising the subtle yet pervasive ways racism and inequality can influence care. Our commitment should be no more remarkable than a Black woman receiving the exceptional care that is her right.
Tackling inequalities and promoting social justice are in BfN’s DNA. We know we can do more to communicate this commitment and we are continuously working behind the scenes to create lasting change.
This Black Breastfeeding Week is an important opportunity to reflect on action across BfN to respond to inequity and exclusion. These are a window into ongoing work on anti-racism in all areas and a foundation on which we must go further.
We continue to educate ourselves, aided by the foundation laid by the fabulous BRAP. And now, every staff member — regardless of their role — must have a performance objective focused on meaningfully advancing equality within their area of work.
We’re learning to be bolder in both our individual and organisational goals. Tackling inequality requires sustained effort. Connecting individual performance reviews with Board-level reporting will maintain momentum on this work across BfN.
In each of BfN’s services, staff seek to build trust and engage with under-served communities to further improve the relevance and accessibility of our offer. In Portsmouth, the service manager worked with local Parenting Network to co-locate new services within a baby bank in areas of highest deprivation. This collaboration has significantly increased the number of under-served Black and Brown mothers regularly accessing BfN services.
Throughout the year, communications and marketing staff worked closely with colleagues managing the National Breastfeeding Helpline. Using anonymized and up-to-date call data and feedback, they adjusted marketing channels, messages, images, timing, targeting, and language. Call volumes increased month by month, notably amongst Black and minoritized women.
Tutors, NBH and HR staff used the addition of a night shift to the National Breastfeeding Helpline to actively encourage applications from women from minoritised racial groups. Whilst these efforts need sustained effort, there’s useful learning about the steps we can take to make our training and paid opportunities more accessible. Making training accessible is essential to improving representation of under-served women within our staff and volunteer network.
Apart from targeted training for Black and Brown women, in our training activities, BfN’s Training Developer reviewed all BfN’s courses through an equalities lens. Based on feedback she adapted language, assessment methods, and teaching approaches used. To ensure courses are as effective as possible at preparing BfN staff and volunteers to deliver inclusive services and to take account of potential barriers to learners, she introduced teams of trainee reviewers—including women from under-served communities— to help update and design the training. Trainees now draw on their lived experiences to shape and improve BfN’s training.
The Information Officer at BfN improves and updates Drugs in Breastmilk Information Service factsheets. She has reviewed these popular resources to make them more accessible and relevant to all communities, focusing on explaining how evidence about treatments and breastfeeding can differ for Black and minoritised women.
Over the past year, BfN’s finance team actively supported service teams on how to develop and renegotiate budgets to incorporate additional outreach activities targeting under-served women. The team also worked with Directors and programme staff to establish a small, designated fund to support activities that enhance equality impact by improving reach and accessibility of services.
BfN can and will go further. We’re starting to see encouraging signs that a joined-up approach is making a difference in the support offered to Black and minoritised women and their families.
Since March 2024, the National Breastfeeding Helpline — run by the Breastfeeding Network with the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers —extended vital support around the clock, every day of the year. Recently the independent evaluators confirmed that 33% of callers to the helpline now come from Black and minoritised women, a significant rise from 20% in late 2023.
Danielle McKenzie breastfed all her children including her two twins who arrived prematurely. She described her journey on Boobingit and highlighted why she decided to train and volunteer with BfN:
‘What I hadn’t expected was for my girls to arrive early; and only as they were being whisked off to the NICU did I learn that you cannot breastfeed a premature baby (directly). I asked about donation milk and was told this was not an option. I died a little. I felt like I had failed before I had even begun.
During the first couple of days, I wasn’t allowed to see my babies because I was quarantining. I therefore hand-expressed obsessively and sent down syringe after syringe of colostrum with the midwives.
… The only thing I felt I could do for my babies was to give them my milk, and by day 6, my girls were exclusively on my breastmilk. Expressing had become my life.
Once home, breastfeeding has been as amazing, gruelling, and beautiful as I expected… This mama has no restrictions.
The fact that I’ve been able to exclusively breastfeed my babies is everything to me.’
Danielle reflects back today: ‘… To be honest at the time I had no idea about the disparity in breastfeeding rates amongst black women and also sadly birth outcomes too.
This makes me even more proud to have exclusively breastfed all of my children and the reason why I volunteer paired with the very brief but magical support I received from the breastfeeding helpline.’
If there is one key take-away from Five x More’s report it is that throughout the perinatal journey there continues to be a substantial and unacceptable gap between what gets measured and what Black women actually experience. The theme of this year’s Black Breastfeeding Week – Rooted in Breastfeeding Success, Grounded in Community Support – is a reminder that there can be no let up and no scope for complacency.
As service providers, we have a duty to maintain momentum, continue to centre our work with Black and minoritised women like Danielle, and continue to improve the work that we do across BfN so that every woman and every family can rely on respectful, equitable and high-quality support on how to feed their child.