Why Is Breastfeeding in Public Still so Taboo? [View all]

[KamaAina]

https://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/why-is-breastfeeding-in-public-still-so-taboo-181911881.html

Anyone averse to breastfeeding in public would have been wise to steer clear of West 26th Street in New York City Monday morning. That’s where a clutch of 30 women were stationed in front of the studio of "The Wendy Williams Show", defiantly nursing their babies to protest the host’s dissing of Karlesha Thurman — the 25-year-old graduate whose breastfeeding photo stirred a maelstrom of criticism recently.

“I am all for breastfeeding, but do not like breastfeeding in public,” Williams had said on her show Friday. “I don’t want to see it at my kitchen table, I don’t want to see it at Target, I don’t want to see it at Starbucks, in the airplane — and I especially don’t want to see it at graduation.”

Her comments rankled mommy bloggers and tweeters across the Internet and inspired Monday’s nurse-in, dubbed “Milkies in Manhattan” by organizer Patricia Villaverde, a breastfeeding advocate. “I found it so hypocritical that she says she’s fine with breastfeeding but that she doesn’t want to see it,” Villaverde told Yahoo Shine in between nursing sessions with her 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, whom she carried in a front pack. “Why is she making a nursing mother feel like her only option is to hide?” The idea behind the nurse-in, she added, was “not meant to be a breast-is-best thing” but simply an attempt to “normalize what’s normal.” ...

Over the weekend in Connecticut, for example, a nurse-in drew more than 50 moms and babies to a Friendly’s restaurant in Norwich. The women came out in support of Tabitha Donohue, who says she was eating lunch and nursing her 8-week-old daughter at a table there last week when a manager asked her to either cover up or stop breastfeeding. “I told them I didn’t want to do either of those things,” Donohue said in an interview with Fox CT. “What’s offensive about breastfeeding?”