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Focusing on diseases shapes the types of goals advocacy organizations pursue and the types of laws Congress passes. Over time, the pressure to adopt goals that fit neatly within disease categories, corporate influence, and the strategic avoidance of controversy encouraged disease advocates to prioritize awareness and research over prevention and access to treatment. This creates a health policy portfolio that subsidizes corporate interests, ignores collective risks, fails to challenge inequalities, and may actually make people less healthy by encouraging overtreatment. Yet while only a small proportion of organizations focus on prevention and treatment access, the phenomenal growth of disease advocacy means that large numbers of organizations continue to pursue the latter goals. Narrow goals outnumber broader goals but do not displace them.

This chapter brackets the question of whether research has sufficiently demonstrated the advantages of breastfeeding in order to ask whether, even if proven, such benefits would be strong enough to justify the rhetoric of contemporary advocacy. A case study of the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign (NBAC), sponsored in 2004–2006 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reveals that the campaign distorted both the putative risks of bottle feeding and the costs or trade-offs of breastfeeding. The campaign, and particularly its fear-based approach, exploited the dynamics of a culture consumed by risk and total motherhood. Based on weak and inconsistent research, it capitalized on the public's misunderstanding of risk and risk assessment by portraying infant nutrition as a matter of safety versus danger and then creating misleading analogies. Crucially, it ignored the risks and trade-offs of breastfeeding itself, costs that are overwhelmingly shouldered by mothers.

This chapter examines representations of pregnant women who cope with “unwanted newborns,” as seen in infant abandonment prevention advocacy, safe haven legal advocacy, and media coverage of women who have abandoned or safely surrendered newborns. Safe haven laws encourage “a subtle structure of surveillance over women, warning society to be alert to mothers who might abandon—or abort—their children.” The chapter considers how this surveillance structure is advanced by advocates who target teenagers and school-age populations. To understand how baby safe haven advocates have publicized the laws and educated the public about the need for them, the chapter looks at public service announcements, short videos, television and radio stories, websites, school curricula, and Facebook pages. It considers how these safe haven awareness campaigns promote visible images of good and bad mothers, and thus narrow ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother.

Focusing on three national case studies this chapter explores the comparative empirical data on public knowledge and understanding of human trafficking, examining the link between public knowledge and public policies. It highlights how public understanding of the issues are shaped by pervading state neoliberal governmentalities, focusing largely on vulnerable victims and perpetrators, but rarely located in personal lives as ‘consumer-citizens’.

This chapter extends explorations of representations of the human body into an examination of two prominent discursive sites concerning contemporary practices of breastfeeding, the US government’s 2004 National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign and La Leche League International. It suggests, against expectation, that Hannah Rosin’s controversial piece in The Atlantic, “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” (2009) might turn out to provide one of the most compelling public accounts of how breastfeeding can be appreciated for its engagement with the Real. Here, rather than in an overt engagement with reality and deception, we encounter the way in which the Real haunts accounts of the body that aim to firmly ground themselves within the Symbolic realm (the national campaign) and the Imaginary realm (La Leche).