Breastfeeding in Public

Every now and then this issue comes up: A woman is breastfeeding her baby in public, someone else sees breast-flesh and feels offended, and then some nasty words are said. Cue Facebook war.

Just last week, a notoriously conservative fast-food restaurant kicked a woman and her baby out for breastfeeding without a cover.

Before writing this, I had assumed that public breastfeeding had always been part of the traditional patriarchal strategy to keep women home, barefooted and pregnant. But after a bit of googling, it seems I was wrong -- at least in the western world. Sometime during or after the industrial revolution, breastfeeding acquired a stigma that notably ramped up and hasn’t much ramped down since. Before then, well, it’s hard to know just how accepted any given practice was in Ye Olden Tymes -- but there’s plenty of reason to think that plenty of people never had a problem with the practice.

In fact, there is a long history of Christian art depicting Mary proudly breastfeeding the baby Jesus. Most famously, this image appears in the Cathedral of Santa Maria. Also notable is the 11th-century Catholic monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, who claimed a vision of Mary breastfeeding him. (See the second image.) This breastfeeding was said to have worked a miracle on Bernard, and this myth was used throughout the Middle Ages to reinforce belief in miracles. Which puts the stigma that has grown up around breastfeeding in a rather un-Christian light, if such things matter to you.

When you get right down to it, this issue is all about family values. Babies need to be fed; that's what breast milk is for. And if a mother needs to feed her child in public, she deserves the freedom to do so -- without a cover, if her baby won’t eat in the dark. If seeing a mother breastfeeding her baby makes me uncomfortable, I can only imagine that her other options are ten times as uncomfortable or inconvenient for her than it is for me to simply look away.

As is often the case with these kind of issues, righteousness can be found in the empathetic weighing of harms:

The harm of me being momentarily uncomfortable until I look away from a breastfeeding mother.

v.

The harm of a baby being hungry,

The harm of the inconvenience of a mother having to leave a meal with her family to find a private space to feed a baby who won’t eat under a cover,

And the harm of everyone nearby being uncomfortable due to the hungry crying baby while she does so.

As the saying goes, 'it takes a village to raise a child,' and while mothers don’t expect strangers to nurse their children, the least a stranger can do is let a mother nurse her own child in peace.