I think the picture is real. For one thing, it’s in my Physical Anthropology textbook! The title of the book is Introduction to Physical Anthropology, Ninth Edition, by Robert Jermain, Lynn Kilgore and Harry Nelson.
The caption underneath the picture reads :
This is a mother with her twin children. The one on the left is a boy and is breastfed. The girl, on the right, is bottle-fed. This illustrates both differential treatment of boys and girls in many societies and the potential negative effects of bottle-feeding.
If that’s true (and who knows what the motives/thoughts are of the woman in the picture) then this seems like an example of gender-based neglect more than anything else. But of course, we have no idea about the life of the woman in the picture – it’s possible the little girl on the right is sick from some other illness.
The photograph is attributed to Dr. Mushtag A. Khan and Dr. Gul N. Rehman, Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, Islamabad.
The textbook in question is a basic college-level intro anthropology book.
Seriously, I have no idea if the circumstances surrounding the picture are as described by the various websites, or my textbook. My point was just that, since the authors chose to cite the source for the picture (and, according to Google, there’s both a “Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences” and a “Dr. Gul N Rehman” in existence) I don’t think the photograph was photoshopped.
Rehman and Khan could both, of course, be photoshopping liars… but if it’s true that the source is a couple of Pakistani doctors, it makes it unlikely that the picture was created solely for Unicef by the anti-Nestle (or anti-bottle feeding) websites that the OP mentioned. Then again, the doctors could be anti-bottle feeding activists… and I guess you’d have to do more research on their backgrounds to see if they’d have a reason to fake the photo.
For the record, I don’t think it’s fake. If they wanted a photograph of a healthy baby next to a sick one, I’m sure they could have found plenty, unfortunately, in Pakistan.
I’m a bit confused, though. Usually the anti-Nestle people accuse Nestle of saying that formula is better than breast milk. So in this case, wouldn’t the woman reserve the “superior” formula for the boy? I think I’m missing something here… could anyone help me out?
