I was recently informed by a guy friend of mine that there was a breastfeeding protest at a Vancouver clothing store after a woman was asked to move to a change room while feeding her two-month old child.
I thought it was awesome that it garnered so much response from the local community. He wondered why it wasn't reasonable to ask her to cover up or use a washroom while breastfeeding.
The Canadian Pediatric Society recommends feeding a baby exclusively breast milk for between four and six months. Are we really, as a society that supposedly encourages breastfeeding, still hung-up on the idea of an exposed breast as being "icky"?
Elisabeth Sterken, a nutritionist and the director of INFACT Canada (Infant Feeding Action Coalition), says "Because there can be no discrimination on the basis of sex, and breastfeeding is something women do, to discriminate against breastfeeding women would violate that."
All I see is a society that so sexualizes the female breast, that to view one being put to use in ways that are natural and normal is actually seen as pornographic or disturbing. What's really disturbing is that it is normalized to ask women to feed their children in public washrooms (those very same washrooms where the walls are said to have more bacteria than the bottom of a garbage can - gross).
Why can't we get over the fact that boobs are naturally for feeding babies and can serve secondarily as areas of pleasure and sexuality? It's disturbing to me that people can still state that "...breastfeeding is a choice not a right, and just like with all of our choices we need to stop being selfish and consider how they will affect others."
Breastfeeding in public = selfish decision-making? Ouch.
Regardless of the opinion on the matter, Canadian public policy supports breastfeeding in public establishments. Asking a woman to leave is a violation of the Human Rights Code and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Yet, here we are for the millionth time. What gives? I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the issue.
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FYI, There are a number of similar threads on this site--you can use the search get other people's thoughts on the issue (at least one, I believe, is relatively recent).
This is the first time I've heard of people characterizing this "choice" as selfish, though! I can't even comment...I'll start ranting and get out of control.
I think that protest is awesome. Just what we need. Get out there and give people the message all together. I didn't know almost 100% of Canadian mothers breastfeed. How is something so common among mothers not more accepted? It's the same as other things almost all women do at some point (menstruate, take birth control) that aren't seen as normal, every day things.
I wrote a post on here recently about feminism and breastfeeding. I go to medical school. In our health professions dept., the nursing students were giving presentations on research projects. One group had a poster on breastfeeding. I walked up to chat them up; it's one of my favorite topics. One of the women who DID the presentation was saying how women were ashamed to breastfeed in public or in front of relatives, and that she would never do it.
And she was one of the nursing students who worked on the poster about the overwhelming health benefits of breastfeeding and how it should be encouraged.
I told them about the same article I wrote about. Which echoed one of my frequent arguments. This is a health decision, not a social decision. The article argued it in a different way - formula companies (and other people, like this nurse) focus much more on emotional issues than on medical and health issues. Shame about doing what is the best medical decision shouldn't be as important as it is. Other social considerations, too, like the whole backlash issue (don't talk about breastfeeding benefits, which are real, significant medical benefits, because the small percent of women who truly try and cannot breastfeed may have their feelings hurt) also dominates the conversation.
I can't believe people are serious when they advocate that women should breastfeed their babies in the public restroom with a cloth over their head. I wouldn't want to eat like that. I would never force anyone else to, either, regardless of how young they are.
The only people here who are selfish are those who see the female breast and nipple as existing solely for erotic purposes, and try to push the same interpretation down my throat by banning breastfeeding. Personally, when I see a baby eating from the breast of a woman the last thing on my mind is sex. It's sort of... um... weird that they even think about it that way, to be honest.
It's about shaming the mothers. They're told they're bad parents if they don't breastfeed, and that they're bad women if they do it in public. Infants have to eat at frequent intervals. of course women have to breastfeed in public. the whole thing is so common sense.
It's hard for me to even think about how bound-up this issue is with other motherhood issues; women should be breastfeeding, but not in public, and they shouldn't get any paid time off from work to do it, etc.
I worked for a long time in a restaurant and actually had customers ask me, on several occasions, to remove a breastfeeding woman from the dining room. as if I should have control over her body. or they should. it makes me sick.
Most horrible thing I think I've ever heard uttered about breastfeeding in public:
“Probably the worst thing that can happen is when you're in a public place, minding your own business, and the next thing you know you look up and there's some lady that got her boob in a kid's mouth - right there in your face as if that shit's cool or something! The other day, I was chilling in my room at the Waldorf watching CNN when they had a story about some ladies who are going out and doing that shit on purpose, as some kind of protest,” Crawford writes.
“Now, it's my opinion that there's never, ever, at any point, an excuse for a woman to be breastfeeding a child in public. If the baby is hungry, then it needs be fed before it leaves the house. If the baby is out of the house long enough that it needs to be fed again, then it needs to be returned to wherever it came from. After all, it's a baby, not a camel. If, for some sort of unforseen reason, the baby is out and can't wait until it's home to be fed, then that needs to take place in a restroom just like any other activity that involves the whipping out of nasty bits.
“No homo, of course, on the fact that I don't want to see any women's boobs in public unless it's costing me at least a dollar (not counting the $10 surcharge), but it's been my experience that there's no such thing as a hot woman that breastfeeds. (Because the only thing breastfeeding women should have on their mind is whether or not you think they're hot) As can be seen above, any time you see a woman with her tit in a kid's mouth, it's some big, floppy, pale thing, not to mention the possibility of spotting one that's got motherfucking hair on it. Now that's just wrong!
“You would think that it might occur to these so-called lactivists that if they were really looking to sway people's opinions to the cause of public breastfeeding, that they might go and find the 30 best-looking titties in town and have them all out on display instead, but that's women for you: They're so wrapped up in their cause that they can't even make a titty look good. No homo again just because that shit just ain't right,” Crawford states.
Thanks Byron Crawford. You're a douchebag.
You can find him at http://www.byroncrawford.com/ or byron.crawford@gmail.com if you care to leave a message.
Sorry... that guy made my skin crawl.