Breastfeeding frenzy disrespects mums
Reported September 11, 2009
ON billboards and beaches, in city offices, at shopping malls and cafes, bulbous breasts in uplift bras are everywhere.
Yet put a breast to its biological purpose and wait for the uproar. “I don’t p..s in public,” one particularly vulgar responder wrote on a newspaper comment site, “so why should women breastfeed in public?”
An extreme response, perhaps, but a recent survey found that fully one-third of Australians still do not approve of public breast-feeding.
So, sadly, the reaction of the NSW police force to a mother needing time to express milk for her baby probably should not come as a surprise.
And the police employee is not the only victim. As women heed health calls to breast-feed their babies for more than a year, while employment rules provide just 12 months’ maternity leave, the Australian Breastfeeding Association fields thousands of such calls.
The police force intelligence analyst was banned from using tea breaks to express milk for her infant and forced to make up for work time spent expressing.
Another woman complained to the Breastfeeding Association that when she retired to a coffee room – closing the door after her – to express milk, her male colleagues congregated outside for “titty time”, calling out embarrassing and lewd comments.
These reports make it hard to believe it is at least 25 years since Australian maternity hospitals began urging women to move away from the formula-feeding fashion of post-war years – a fashion fed by multi-national profits from baby formula sales.
Instead, mothers were encouraged to trust nature, along with the instincts of themselves and their babies. The World Health Organisation now recommends breast-feeding until children are at least two years old. Australian health providers recommend only breast milk for the first six months.
In a nationwide 2005 survey, the Breastfeeding Association found 181,000 women had returned to the workforce while their children were still being breast-fed. Good on them.
The true tragedy of petty complaints over women expressing milk while at work is the underlying disdain not only for women, but for our babies.
Along with the health benefits, breast-feeding bonds mother and child. How can such a beautiful demonstration of love be offensive?
Work colleagues can accept a 15- or 20-minute cigarette break, but are hostile to a woman nurturing her offspring. And few mothers will express milk for as many years as it takes smokers to quit.
Instead of supporting a mother’s self-sacrificing decision to nurture her child, she is castigated.
“She should be at home with her kid, a place of work is no place for a baby,” wrote one unsympathetic reader.
Perhaps they would prefer the costs of carers’ leave for parents as they stay home to care for a sick child, given that US research found children weaned early were five times more likely to be hospitalised in their pre-school years.
It also means that while workplaces adopt equal-opportunity employment policies, this equality collapses as soon as a woman becomes a mother.
It also demonstrates ignorance of western governments’ attemptsto encourage young people to have enough babies to replace the elderly.
A century after social sensitivities resulted in beach patrols at Bondi protecting the public from offensive beach wear, public offence is being used to keep breast-feeding mothers out of the workforce.
No wonder so many women choose not to have children, or to stop at one.
Despite assurances women can work and have children, the message here is that childcare remains a woman’s issue.
And in case the critics haven’t noticed, there is an even bigger social crisis: who will work to pay the taxes that keep baby-boomers alive during their increasingly lengthy retirements?
“It is hard to return to work when you have had a child and even harder when people don’t support you,” wrote one exasperated woman.
“My manager was female so it has nothing to do with men discriminating against women.”
Memo to inflexible employers: just like this woman, unhappy staff will look elsewhere for work.
“Where I work now I am valued for the great work I do. I have flexible work and am not made to feel guilty about not working 9-5pm every day.”
So the great mystery is, when did society decide essential care for children was not a social issue?
People are horrified at gross examples of child abuse, yet they seem to be just as horrified at the purest demonstration of maternal love.
Anyone who denigrates or stresses breast-feeding mothers, especially one trying to express milk, obviously has no idea how difficult this can be.
Breast feeding may be natural, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. As much as it is a physical act, it requires psychological calm and contentment.
Who can remember 13 years ago, when Hillary Clinton suggested it takes a village to raise a child?
Perhaps it’s time to rebuild the village – one where our babies are breast-fed and mothers are revered.
Source : www.news.com.au
