Nursing in Public
From time to time I run across stories in the media about breastfeeding in public. A Taunton woman was asked to leave an Iparty store because she plopped down to nurse her baby on the floor. A woman booted from an airplane because she wouldn’t cover up while feeding her baby. Livejournal, a web site that I frequent, created a stir when they disallowed pictures of moms nursing in some areas of the site. Babytalk magazine elicited all kinds of outrage by putting a nursing child on the cover of its publication.
There are so many negative stories about nursing moms out there that one would think America has one major hang up about breastfeeding. This has created a swell of protest among nursing moms. There is a legion of women cheerfully known as boob-nazis who insist that nursing in public, anywhere at any time, is their God given right, and they will make a huge fuss about anyone who suggests they might want to nurse in private or for heaven’s sake, cover up a little bit. One blogger in an online community I belong to posted that she was eagerly anticipating her first post-partum visit to McDonald’s. Not because she was dying for that first, post-pregnancy Big Mac, but because she intended to nurse her baby while she was there. Just in case anyone asked her to stop, she had the numbers for the Human Rights Commission and the local news network in her purse.
To me, breastfeeding is not an occasion for activism. It’s a simple, natural, beautiful act. I am happy to report that here in Concord NH, and surrounding towns, I have never had a single problem nursing an infant in public. If I happen to be out and about with my wee one in tow, and she is hungry, I find a quiet place, sit down and feed her. A little lift of the shirt, a quick latching on of infant, a blanket to cover anything needing covering and we are all set. I recently sat down on a bench at Walmart and nursed my baby. A woman came up to us and tickled Julia’s foot, and only then, that close, did she see that I was nursing. She smiled and congratulated me on my baby before she walked away. No one reported me to management, no one stared or glared, no one even looked twice in our direction.
I’ve nursed at McDonald’s, the mall, White’s Park, various parking lots…anywhere my baby happens to be hungry. And I feel blessed that Julia and I live in a community where no one raises a fuss at the site of a mother nourishing her infant in the way nature intended.
Perhaps much of it has to do with how you do it. I see nothing wrong with nursing in public, as long as it is done with some amount of discretion. Let's face it. The reality is, if a woman where to lift her shirt and expose her breast in public without having a child attached, she would be charged with indecent exposure. There are people who are going to be uncomfortable with seeing a woman nursing her child in public, not because she's nursing but because they are seeing her breast. We drill into people from the time they are children that we don't expose our privates in public, then we have women getting irate because there are people who still feel a woman's breast is "private" even if there is a child attached. The woman who wants to go to McDonald's with the intent of eliciting a response will hopefully do so in a tactful way and not be purposely exposing herself for the chance to make a scene.
And as an aside...even when I was bottle feeding my children, I didn't just plop down on the floor in a store and start feeding them. Women who insist on using breast feeding as an excuse for poor manners are not helping the cause any.