Nursecution

Many bottle-feeding mothers mention that they feel “pressured” and “made to feel guilty” about not breastfeeding. While it is clear from the statistics that a majority of mothers do seem to feel duty-bound to give breastfeeding a quick try, the pressure to stick with it must be pretty minor, considering how quickly most American mothers wean their babies from the breast, often before making it home from the hospital. It is fashionable to say that breastfeeding advocates guilt trip people about not nursing, and the feeding choices of all mothers do need to be respected, but the real harassment in our culture is aimed at mothers who do breastfeed, or at least at mothers who breastfeed outside of a burka. There have been far too many serious incidents in which mothers have been persecuted for nursing, incidents that make other mothers afraid of the isolation that breastfeeding for very long would mean in a hostile environment. This culture of harassment is a major public health issue that dramatically shortens breastfeeding duration in America and increases the strain on our already inadequate health care system.

In 2006, people wrote letters of protest and media outlets made a huge fuss when BabyTalk Magazine featured a close-up of a nursing baby on its cover…although it is a magazine about babies and features many feeding-related articles on a regular basis. People expressed their outrage that their adolescent sons might get hold of such smut. In the same year, Emily Gillette was kicked off of a Freedom Airlines flight for refusing to put a blanket over the head of her nursing child. In a Kentucky Applebee’s Restaurant in 2007, a mother was told that she had to cover her nursing child with a blanket when she was nursing in the restaurant. In that same year, a medical student was not allowed to take time out of her all-day board exam to pump her breasts – is there something wrong with this picture? 2007 was also the year when Bill Maher and Barbara Walters, among other celebrities, felt called to make nasty comments about breastfeeding in public. Most shocking of all, however, is the fact that in 2007, a Houston Ronald McDonald House told a mother that she could not breastfeed her son, who had brain cancer, in the common room of the House, as it might make other people ‘uncomfortable’.

Here in Corpus Christi, I personally know women who have been told that they cannot nurse at swimming pools, the elementary schools of their older children and the public library, even though Texas has a law that protects breastfeeding mothers and children from this sort of harassment. Since the law does not really contain a penalty for its violation, many Texas venues continue to break it with impunity. This sort of treatment tells mothers that they will be second-class citizens if they nurse their children. If they do not want to be vilified for doing what is in the best interests of their children and public heath, they must hide and isolate themselves and their families. This is ridiculous. It is criminal. It is a culture that hurts and even kills children, as four out of a thousand children in the U.S. die from not being breastfed each year, not even counting SIDS deaths, which rarely ever happen to breastfed babies.