Battle of the breast: normalizing nursing in public

breast (plural breasts)

1. Either of the two fleshy organs on the front of a woman's chest, which contain the mammary glands; also the analogous organs in men.

mammary gland (plural mammary glands)

1. (anatomy) A gland that secretes milk for suckling an infant or offspring.


Seems pretty cut and dry right? To bad it could not be further from the truth. The land we live in today sees breasts in a totally different manner.

I have been a breast feeding mother for over four years now, I have three children and I have nursed all of them. Since I did not want to be a hermit I have also nursed in public ( shocking I know ). You would not think some one sitting down to feed their child was be such a hot topic but it is.

You see it on the news often, women kicked out of one place or another for nursing. Just a quick google search will pull up way more articles then I care to list on the amount of women that have been asked to leave or harassed because of this. What many people do not know is that this is a right protected by 45 states, 28 states have laws exempting it from public indecency and 24 states have laws when it comes to breastfeeding and the work place.

Recently I was reading a post on a local news website about a women being asked to leave a mall because of breast feeding. While the news article did a good job of being non - biased ( like any good news article should be ) the comments left by other readers were pretty shocking to me. I could not believe the amount of people that thought she should not be feeding her baby in front of them. Comments like " breastfeeding is not even the healthiest way to feed your child anymore" , " that is disgusting, go do it in the bathroom " and " I do not want to see your hooters" were very prevalent in their posting. Yet after looking at another article posted by the same site about a lingerie football game some of these same people thought that was perfectly okay. I was pretty shocked by this.

Not only is it in the news but I have also seen nursing in public come under attack in parenting magazines, woman's magazines and other places.

When it comes to nursing photographs, myspace and facebook have been deleting them and comparing them to porn. I have only had one photo removed but I did recently have facebook take down a picture a friend posted on my wall, that I had asked for to post in this very blog. Not only did they remove the picture but they warned her for posting something of a sexually nature. I have contacted facebook about it and basically was given the excuse of " some employees do not see the difference "

While I know that breasts are way over sexuality in this country, I never imagined that something like nursing in public would come under attack the way it has.

I have personally experienced a pretty horrible event when it comes to nursing photographs and nursing in public. I was attacked by people I trusted, called horrible names, said nursing in church was ungodly and they went as far as to tell me that by posting a picture of my son nursing I was causing my christian brother to stumble. This was very hurtful and damaging to me. I could not believe I was attacked in this manner for something like nursing my child.

Women that nurse need to be held up and praised, not put down and demeaned. I honestly think that all nursing mothers need to nursing in public more. The more that women nurse in public the more we will normalize it. Ladies, keep nursing in public, keep your head held high and never let someone put you down for doing what is best for your child!

Here are some photos for your viewing pleasure.












And last of not least a couple great videos:












*** for a complete list of all laws mentioned and other laws not mentioned please visit:
http://www.ncsl.org/issuesresearch/health/breastfeedinglaws/tabid/14389/default.aspx