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Breastfeeding: Battle against bottle-feeding and bias still needed

by Lisa Anderson | https://twitter.com/LisaAndersonNYC | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Tuesday, 31 March 2015 17:57 GMT

* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

From Sao Paulo to South Dakota, a flurry of protests and new laws on breastfeeding reflect a push by women to claim their right to breastfeed in public

By Lisa Anderson

NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - From Sao Paulo to South Dakota, a flurry of protests and new laws on breastfeeding reflect a renewed push by women to claim their right to breastfeed their babies in public.

Even in societies that barely blink at women in bikinis with minimal mammary coverage, tolerate topless beaches or placidly perused over 40 years of tabloid topless Page 3 girls in Britain's Sun, it seems that when it comes to breast use by babies, it is all a matter of time and place.

Breastfeeding has long been considered the best way of nourishing babies and strengthening their immune systems by the World Health Organization and other global authorities, but it remains a curiously contentious practice in some public settings.

"People will be more easily offended by a woman breastfeeding than a woman in a bikini. I think that has to do with the sexualisation of the breast," said Diana West, an international board certified lactation consultant and director of media relations for La Leche League, one of the world's leading organisations promotion breastfeeding.

Last December, for example, London's iconic five-star Claridge's hotel sparked a mass "nurse-in" by mothers enraged that a woman there was issued a large, starched table napkin in which to enshroud herself while she nursed her infant daughter.

Claridge's was reported as saying it was all for breastfeeding but also for observing some discretion around fellow guests. Breastfeeding advocates said it was just that kind of behaviour, in effect shaming the mother, which discourages women from breastfeeding.

The Equality Act of 2010 guarantees women the right to breastfeed in public places in the United Kingdom and makes it illegal for anyone to stop them.

Worse still, if rather ironically so, was a February Scottish Government-sponsored conference in Edinburgh on breastfeeding that reportedly aimed to "remove some of the barriers" to breastfeeding while blithely informing nursing mothers that breastfeeding would be inappropriate at the venue.

After complaints, the conference organisers sheepishly backed down.

In March, Facebook, the giant social media platform, also backpedalled on its stance that photos of nursing women violated its ban on nudity. It did so, however, only after women protested its removal of breastfeeding photos by deluging the site with breastfeeding selfies, dubbed "brelfies."

Laws protecting the rights of women to breastfeed in public continue to proliferate.

In February, South Dakota became one of the last U.S. states to pass a law specifically allowing women to breastfeed in public or private spaces. But, like most laws protecting breastfeeding, it has no provision for enforcement or penalty for those who flout it.

Not so a new law approved in March by the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo. Believed to be the first of its kind anywhere, the bill would levy a fine of 100 GBP ($150) on any business or organisation that prevents a woman from breastfeeding in public.

It came, however, only after three years of annual protests by lactating mothers on the city's main street, where they chanted "Breastfeeding is my right" while blatantly exercising that right in public.

While the benefits of breastfeeding are solidly established, the ability of many women to stay the optimal course, a minimum six months of exclusive breastfeeding after birth, remains more shaky.

In the United States, for example, breastfeeding rates have improved over the last few decades, according to Beverly Ann Curtis, a certified lactation consultant and chair of the United States Breastfeeding Committee, which promotes and supports breastfeeding.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that about 80 percent of all mothers start breastfeeding after birth, but by six months less than 50 percent are still doing it, and less than 20 percent are providing breast milk exclusively. After one year, only about 26 percent are breastfeeding at all.

Negative attitudes about breastfeeding may discourage some women, but not as much as the lack of a federally mandated paid maternity leave, Marsha Walker, a certified lactation consultant and executive director of the National Alliance for Breastfeeding Advocacy, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"That is a huge barrier. I've worked with mothers who have to go back in three weeks because they can't afford not to work. That impacts breastfeeding," she said.

A 2010 federal law requires employers of 50 or more people to provide space and time for mothers to pump breast milk in the workplace but it remains a difficulty for women whose work takes place outdoors or in off-site locations, for example.

And, while attitudes in many parts of the world have become more accepting to breastfeeding as a natural part of life, La Leche's West noted, "Even when there's a good law in place we still have a lack of understanding of the normalcy of breastfeeding in the United States."

($1 = 0.6757 pounds)

(Reporting by Lisa Anderson, Editing by Tim Pearce)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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