Motherhood Is Political

"It was motherhood that got me into the [feminist] movement in the first place. I became an activist after recognizing how excruciatingly personal the political was to me and my sons. It was the women’s movement that put self-esteem back into 'just a housewife,' rescuing our intelligence from the junk pile of 'instinct' and making it human, deliberate, powerful."
--Mary Kay Blakely

I thought that my life has been pretty mundane (although also tons of fun) in my first few weeks of motherhood. I sleep, feed Molly, do laundry, feed Molly, change diapers, and, oh yes, did I mention feed the girl. Little did I know that on our first big outing with the inlaws earlier this week, I was once again engaged in political activism.

Via Feministe, the New York Times reports on a group of breastfeeding mothers ("lactivists") who are demanding their rights to nurse their babies in public:

The calls for a "nurse-in" began on the Internet mere moments after Barbara Walters uttered a negative remark about public breast-feeding on her ABC talk show, "The View."

The protest, inspired by similar events organized by a growing group of unlikely activists nationwide in the last year, brought about 200 women to ABC's headquarters yesterday. They stood nursing their babies in the unmistakably public venue of Columbus Avenue and West 67th Street. They held signs reading, "Shame on View," and "Babies are born to be breastfed." Ms. Walters, who remarked a few weeks ago on the show that the sight of a woman breast-feeding on an airplane next to her had made her uncomfortable, said through a spokesman that "it was a particular circumstance and we are surprised that it warrants a protest."

But the rally at ABC is only the most visible example of a recent wave of "lactivism." Prodded by mothers who say they are tired of being asked to adjourn to the bathroom while nursing in a public space, six states have recently passed laws giving a woman the right to breast-feed wherever she "is otherwise authorized to be."

...

Whether to breast-feed in public, many nursing mothers say, is not simply a matter of being respectful of another person's sensibilities. They cite research by the Food and Drug Administration showing that the degree of embarrassment a mother feels about breast-feeding plays a bigger role in determining whether she is likely to do so than household income, length of maternity leave or employment status.

The American Academy of Pediatrics urges women to feed their babies only breast milk for the first six months, and continue breast-feeding for at least an additional six months. If its recommendations were followed, the group estimates that Americans would save $3.6 billion in annual health care costs because breast-fed babies tend to require less medical care. But while more women are breast-feeding for the first few weeks, fewer than one-third are still nursing after six months. Some doctors attribute the decline to self-consciousness and the difficulties of finding spaces where nursing seems acceptable.

A few days ago, I unwittingly engaged in lactivism no fewer than seven times in five public places (what can I say - when we brought Molly home from the hospital, she weighed only 5 lbs and she is working night and day to catch up to the other babies her age), as the state of Vermont protects my right to do so. Fortunately, no one commented. Jon has asked if I would feel more comfortable nursing Molly in bathroom - most public bathrooms are dirty and gross with no place to sit down. If I wouldn't feel comfortable eating a sandwich there, it certainly isn't an appropriate place for my daughter to eat either.

The fact is that my child's well-being outweighs my sense of modesty and strangers' misguided insistence in seeing breastfeeding as something sexual and indecent. (Unless someone is making a point of gawking up-close, Molly is the only person with a vantage point of my flesh.) And seriously, a starving and squawking newborn is much more disruptive in public than my act of nursing said baby.