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Where can I sit?

Posted by Deb on Thursday February 23, 2006 at 2:40 pm

There’s been a bit of discussion around the blogring this week about the proposed legislation that would protect breastfeeding women from harassment. I’m going to look at it from a slightly different point of view.

Let’s say I’m in a public place - a cafe, or a museum, or on a bus, or a park bench. That okay? Should it be okay for someone to harass me for just sitting there? Is it okay for someone to make nasty comments about me just sitting there, or to make me go and sit somewhere else just because they don’t like something about me?

………

What if I’m breastfeeding?

Should the act of breastfeeding a child reduce my basic rights to sit in a public place?

It seems that a some people think it does - and those are the people who make nasty remarks and tell breastfeeding women that they have to move. It shouldn’t be necessary to explicitly protect breastfeeding women, but it appears that it is.

I know it doesn’t happen very often - but it does happen - it has happened to me (in an art gallery, of all places!) and it has happened to others. And I know - from having provided peer support to breastfeeding women on post-natal wards, and from having spoken to antenatal classes about breastfeeding - that anxiety about breastfeeding in public really does put women off breastfeeding, and it does make them choose to stop sooner.

I know there are lots of other things that we, as a society, could be doing to encourage breastfeeding. But you know what? We don’t have to choose just one. We can do many things. Better training in breastfeeding support for healthcare providers would be great. So would longer maternity leaves, more baby-friendly hospitals, and lots of other stuff. But you know what this one, this little bit of legislation, has in its favour over all of those? It’s easy. It costs nearly nothing. And that makes it more likely to happen than all those other initiatives. And once it’s in place, and women know that they can breastfeed Martini-style (anytime anyplace anywhere, wasn’t it?) - there’s absolutely nothing stopping us for pushing for all those other things.

So why not?

In: opinion

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2 Comments

Comment by Katy
2006-02-23 17:36:30

preaching to the converted here, public BFing was something I was really quite relaxed about and bolshy when needed (bet you can’t imagine me being bolshy now can you ;))

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Comment by Deb
2006-02-23 19:51:44

No more than me, Katy dear… ;-)

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