Breastfeeding In Public Quotes

It is true that breasts can induce sexual tension in men, but truer than that is the fact, that breasts are the primary and healthiest source of nutrition for the infant, so, if men can't use their higher mental faculty of self-restraint at the sight of breastfeeding at public places, then it's not the women who need to change their breastfeeding place, it's the men who need to work on their character.

The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptuous about their easily ridiculed New Age ways. Why shouldn't they nurse their babies till age four? Why shouldn't they want to keep their children away from factory-farmed meats, from clothing soaked in fire-retardant chemicals, from dull-witted burned-out public school teachers whose tenure is all too easily approved? Why not frolic naked in the sprinkler---under the full moon, perhaps? Why not turn one's family into a small nurturing country protected by a virtual moat?

In industrialised countries, despite strong evidence, public health messages do not emphasise the risks of not breastfeeding.

When the agents of public health lament the fact that poor black women breastfeed too little and conceive too much, they forget that that is exactly what rich white men urged their forebears to do.

It's not that we haven't had our own activists and friends in the public-health community in the United States working diligently to increase rates of breastfeeding; it's that we have allowed a health-care industry responsible only to corporate boards of directors and stockholders to take the place of what should be a health-care system designed for the benefit of all of our people. A profit-driven health-care industry has no reason to care about increasing breastfeeding rates (or doing anything else to promote health, for that matter), as doing so will do nothing to boost anyone's profits. I consider it a national embarrassment that our Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has never been able to collect solidly accurate statistics on breastfeeding rates for the first year of our babies' lives through any of its agencies.

The goals set by Stanton, Truth, and Anthony that were achieved during the twentieth-century long after their deaths were audacious. Because of these pioneers and the activists who followed them, women can now own property; divorce an abusive husband; vote; be elected to public office; be professors, executives, or astronauts; fly planes; and wear clothes that would have shocked everyone who lived in the nineteenth century (when women's ankles weren't supposed to be seen). All of these are solid and necessary gains, but today, even in states whose laws declare that breastfeeding cannot be considered "indecent exposure," the harassment of mothers for breastfeeding their babies when they leave their homes continues to a degree that is simply unacceptable. This rudeness to strangers and their babies can and must be stopped. In the nineteenth century, most U.S. mothers—if their health was good— nursed their babies, and people took it for granted that this elemental, nurturing act would have to take place as women traveled. I think it would have been hard for people in the nineteenth century to anticipate that advertising and marketing campaigns by infant formula companies would become the dominant factor in parents' decisions about infant feeding and that infant formula companies could so easily convince the medical profession to become the first promoters of their products.

The goals set by Stanton, Truth, and Anthony that were achieved during the twentieth-century long after their deaths were audacious. Because of these pioneers and the activists who followed them, women can now own property; divorce an abusive husband; vote; be elected to public office; be professors, executives, or astronauts; fly planes; and wear clothes that would have shocked everyone who lived in the nineteenth century (when women's ankles weren't supposed to be seen). All of these are solid and necessary gains, but today, even in states whose laws declare that breastfeeding cannot be considered "indecent expo-sure," the harassment of mothers for breastfeeding their babies when they leave their homes continues to a degree that is simply unacceptable. This rudeness to strangers and their babies can and must be stopped. In the nineteenth century, most U.S. mothers—if their health was good— nursed their babies, and people took it for granted that this elemental, nurturing act would have to take place as women traveled. I think it would have been hard for people in the nineteenth century to anticipate that advertising and marketing campaigns by infant-formula companies would become the dominant factor in parents' decisions about infant feeding and that infant-formula companies could so easily convince the medical profession to become the first promoters of their products.

It was impossible for me not to notice that the women's movement in Norway during the 1960s and 1970s took a different, more inclusive course from that taken in the United States during the same period. The main goals of feminist leaders here focused on making it possible (and safer) for women to choose not to be mothers, expanding women's access to higher education and jobs and professions that had previously been closed to them, giving women the means to combat sexual harassment and domestic violence, and creating access to political office. Norway's feminists worked on all of these issues but on another vitally important area as well: They demanded legislation that would significantly benefit Norwegian mothers and babies. Paid maternity leave, onsite nursery care in the workplace, flexible schedules for working women, and parental benefits were all part of the legislative advances made in Norway during the 1960s and 1970s. Architects followed suit by designing shopping malls, airports, and other public areas with comfortable, attractive places for nursing women and their children to use.

December 2014, ISIS issued a list of rules for Christians living in the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. Those who dare disobey risk calling down on themselves the full force of the Islamic State’s brutal enforcement mechanisms—as inhabitants of that tortured city are well aware, accustomed as they have become to public beheadings and crucifixions; the torture of women who are found insufficiently covered or breastfeeding in public; and the stoning of homosexuals (if, that is, they survive being thrown from rooftops). In the ISIS rules, Christians are forbidden to worship in public and to build or repair churches. They are not allowed to pray where Muslims can hear them, to display the cross, or to ring bells. They are not allowed to prevent anyone from converting to Islam. They must not aid the Islamic State’s enemies.

We do science because we want to understand the truth. It is a constant, ongoing pursuit to understand our own biology so that we can make smart choices at an individual and policy level. If the science of breastfeeding is used first and foremost as a tool for breastfeeding promotion, we compromise public trust in science. Biased information about breastfeeding also sets up infant feeding as a debate, which sometimes escalates to mommy war status, and it doesn't need to be either of these.

Away from the workplace these same workers might pay to watch a woman expose her breasts for the sexual stimulation of strangers. They might pay more for food served by bare-breasted women. Though any part of a woman’s body can be a focus of eroticism, our era is the first in recorded history where the breast has become a public fetish for male sexual stimulation, while its primary function has diminished on a vast scale.

Breastfeeding in industrialised society is closely bound up with perceptions of sexuality. The very reason it is frowned upon in public is that breasts are perceived as objects of sexual attention.

In Victorian England, famous for its prudery, a respectable woman could feed openly in church,37 yet in contemporary industrialised society where women’s bodies and particularly breasts are used to sell newspapers, cars and peanuts, public breastfeeding still provokes disapproval from both men and women.

Women report that it is often other women who ask them to stop breastfeeding or leave a café or other public place.

The integration of mothers and babies into public life was viewed with ridicule and alarm in many societies.

Meanwhile, breastfeeding was still frowned upon when I was born back in 1966, so I have no preconscious memories of the comfort of her breast either. I don’t blame her for not breastfeeding me or my sisters. At all. I blame the industrial revolution. I blame bad science. I blame a society that not only told women that breastfeeding was kind of icky, indecent, and strictly for those in the lower classes who couldn’t afford formula, but that also frowned upon a woman breastfeeding in public without providing any viable alternatives