The politics of breastfeeding
TORY ZIMMERMAN/TORONTO STAR
Sarah Kaplan, whose Toronto store Evymama caters to nursing and pregnant women, breastfeeds Remy, 7 months, at her shop.
Breastfeeding Week
This Saturday, moms and babies all over Canada will sit down together for a nice meal. But only the wee ones will eat. The menu: breast milk.
It’s all part of the annual Breastfeeding Challenge, a friendly competition to see who can get the most babies feeding in one location at the same time. The event, aimed at encouraging breastfeeding in public, is being held to kick off World Breastfeeding Week, which starts next Monday.
For more information on where the challenge is taking place in your area, visit the website babyfriendly.ca/challenge.
To find out more about World Breastfeeding Week events, go to infactcanada.ca/WBW.htm.
Laws are clear that nursing moms are free to do it anywhere, anytime. But …
Sep 24, 2007 04:30 AM
Andrea Gordon
Family Issues Reporter
Don’t mess with the lactivists.
If that isn’t already a slogan, it should be. Right up there with “breast is best,” “anytime, anywhere” and all the other ones aimed at promoting breastfeeding.
Just ask Facebook. Or the YMCA of Greater Toronto. Or the Applebee’s restaurant chain in the U.S. Or anyone else who has ticked off nursing moms lately.
Last month, Facebook closed the account of an Edmonton mother who had posted breastfeeding photos and the site deleted images many others has put up, claiming they violated rules about nudity and “obscene content.” Breastfeeding advocates set up a petition group on the social networking site called “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene.” It hit the news and within days, the petition had more than 20,000 members.
Last week, Pickering mother Carolynn Prior filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after staff at the Scarborough YMCA asked her to leave the pool deck, where she was breastfeeding her 5-month-old son. The organization later called it “an error in judgment.”
And earlier this month, nursing moms and advocates staged protests in front of Applebee’s restaurants across the U.S. after a mom in Lexington, Ky., was told to cover up at one of the chain’s “breastfeeding-friendly” establishments.
So why, amid news of poverty, war and elections, is breastfeeding such an explosive issue that people can’t wait to weigh in on? Probably because it touches on everything from women’s rights to our sexualized culture to the mixed messages constantly dished out to modern moms.
“Good mothers” are supposed to breastfeed, end of story. The medical establishment says so, led by the World Health Organization and the Canadian Paediatric Society, which both recommend nursing children for up to two years and beyond. The Ontario Human Rights Commission says so, too. It is among the growing number of provinces and states that recognize a mother’s right to breastfeed anywhere, anytime without interference.
But socially, it’s not quite so straightforward. It seems everyone’s in favour of breastfeeding – as long as they don’t have to see a breast.
Every time the breastfeeding lactivists whip up their shirts to nurse in protest, legions of the less militant roll their eyes, wondering why they can’t just let it go, cover up and make nice.
To advocates, there are good reasons not to.
“It takes a lot of courage to breastfeed in public. It can make you quite vulnerable,” says Andrea O’Reilly, founder and director of the Association for Research on Mothering at York University.
New moms are especially sensitive. But when the baby is hungry, you have no choice. A woman subject to stares and glares, never mind public scolding, might never want to risk it again, even if it is her legal right. Even Prior, an experienced mother and midwife, says she was devastated and humiliated at being asked to leave the YMCA or cover up.
Joanne Gilmore, manager of the healthy families program for Toronto Public Health, says, “it’s important to keep pushing the envelope” so people embrace the idea of mothers breastfeeding whenever and wherever they need to.
Breastfeeding rates have risen sharply over the past two decades but still, many moms give up after a few months. The best way to encourage them, says Gilmore, is to let them know they can get out of the house and still nurse freely.
Toronto mother and popular blogger Jen Lawrence (go to tomama.blogs.com/mubar) says the kerfuffle over public breastfeeding is one of many inconsistent social messages that seem to go hand-in-hand with motherhood.
Like: go to work, but you’re on your own when it comes to daycare. Or stay home when the kids are little, but don’t look for tax breaks to help you out. Or breastfeed at all costs. But be discreet. Don’t make a fuss. And for God’s sake, don’t show any skin.
The result? Mothers feel unsupported in whatever choices they make and are often defensive. Sometimes that pushes them to extremes, whether it’s breast-versus-bottle, attachment parenting versus cry-it-out or cloth diapers versus disposable.
Lawrence, who has written about her agonizing decision not to breastfeed, says though she supports every woman’s right to breastfeed in public, she’s leery when the advocacy veers toward browbeating.
“The message should be `breastfeeding is best and here are all the ways we can support you to do it,’ not `you’re bad if you don’t,’ because that’s the kind of pressure I was feeling.”
To O’Reilly, the latest controversy shows the issue strikes something deep, powerful and primal – a discomfort based on the madonna-whore complex.
“You’re not supposed to be comfortable in your body and be maternal and sexual at the same time – not that breastfeeding is sexual, but let’s face it, it’s a breast,” she says. “These stories are saying we (as a society) are still uncomfortable with it.”
In other words, while cleavage is used to sell everything from jeans to cars to beer and appears all over Facebook, it’s still not okay to bare your skin in order to feed an infant.
Lest we need further proof that this dichotomy still reigns, we can turn to politically incorrect social commentator Bill Maher, who made lactivists his target last week on HBO and compared breastfeeding openly to masturbating in public. Women who do it in public, he said, are nothing but “Janet Jacksons” trying to attract the spotlight.
As Star reader Linda Genova wrote in a letter to the editor last week, “I believe that such disgust springs from a fear that normalizing the breast in this way could spoil the immature sexual fantasies on which so much of North American culture depends.”
So don’t people have a right to not be comfortable with public breastfeeding? Sure, but even the YMCA this week said it’s time to start dealing with their discomfort as the problem, and not the breastfeeding mom. Those who are uneasy can leave, or look away, or just get used to it. Or as Gilmore says, think of it this way: “What about the rights of the baby – to eat?”
