Monday, October 15, 2012

How far we've come (and how far we have yet to go)

This article about the Luvs commercial featuring breastfeeding made me smile. When I had my first baby, seventeen years ago, I was a committed breastfeeder. (None of my babies ever drank from a bottle.) I was fairly shy about breastfeeding publicly, because I'm really not the activist type, but sometimes I had little choice.

One day I went with the family to an amusement park, and the baby needed feeding. I sat down in a quiet corner, facing a wall, and with a blanket over the baby. Even so, an employee bore down on me, told me that it was a family park, and made me go into the handicapped stall in the restroom to feed the baby. It was not one of my happiest mom moments. It was made still more irritating by the fact that back then, the amusement park allowed people to smoke everywhere, so the message I took away from this was that the park thought a glimpse of discreet breastfeeding would somehow harm children, but that second-hand smoke wouldn't.

I'm sorry that we're still debating this topic seventeen years later, but glad that the discussion is becoming more positive.

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