Mixed messages and hypocrisy

I came across this article in the Toronto Star yesterday and I shook my head.

According to the story, British Columbia artist Kate Hansen posted three of her paintings depicting mothers nursing their babies on a Facebook group for portrait and figure artists on three different occasions. Three times the images disappeared. She received an email from the Facebook Team earlier this month, informing her the paintings had been removed because they violated the social networking site’s terms of use policy.

After making inquiries, the official response from Facebook to the Star is that the paintings were accidentally removed.

Sure. Whatever you say, Facebook.

This story doesn’t surprise me. In recent years, there have been stories about breastfeeding photos being deleted from Facebook. And it isn’t only Facebook. Around the time darling daughter was born, a furor broke out in British Columbia when a breastfeeding mom was ushered into a changing room at a H&M store in Vancouver after she attempted to breastfeed her two month old child in the store. At the time of the incident, employees told the mom it was store policy as breastfeeding may offend customers. In the end, the store backed down, claiming no such policy existed.

We live in a world where we don’t want to offend anyone. We also live in a highly sexualized world where sex sells everything from clothes to cars. We don’t blink twice when we see scantily clad women plastered on billboards, on magazine covers or their flashed on television. But our sensibilities are offended when a mother tries to breastfeed her baby in public or posts breastfeeding photos or paintings on Facebook.

Are you freaking kidding me?

While many will argue that women need to be discreet when nursing in public or use nursing rooms, this is hypocrisy at its finest. A woman is using her breasts what they are intended to do: to feed her child. Society views breasts as sexual toys, rather than life saving devices. To say to a woman she should covers up or go to a nursing room is sending the message that her breasts are offensive and to breastfeed her child in public will possibly offend others.

A recent U.S. study revealed that hundreds of lives could be saved as well as billion of dollars in medical costs if all American women were to exclusively breastfeed their children to six months of age. According to the study, 12 per cent of infants in the U.S. are exclusively breastfed to six months of age.

One of the lead authors of the study stated that women shouldn’t be blamed for low breastfeeding rates as they are not adequately supported from the time their babies are born.

Very true. To be honest, I am not sure what the breastfeeding rates are in Canada. According to a Statistics Canada study released in 2007, the extension of maternity leave from six months to one year resulted in breastfeeding targets recommended by public health agencies have been met.

However, the study also revealed that women weren’t more likely to initiate breastfeeding or attempt breastfeeding due to extended leave entitlements. But extended leave did result in women breastfeeding longer.

I’ve been giving breastfeeding some thought after reading this thought provoking post written by a blogger I follow. Then I started thinking: what is causing low breastfeeding rates? And I came up with some conclusions based on my own personal experience.

Firstly, women don’t adequate support. We are told breast is best, but often we are left on our own to figure out how to do something that we’ve been told that is natural. You may have one nurse tell you one thing, only to have another to tell you something else, resulting in confusing and conflicting information. I was able to access a breastfeeding program through the hospital I gave birth at. However, there were barriers. The program was only accessible to women who had given birth at the facility and they were only able to access it until their child was three weeks old. There was also a financial barrier as it cost $13 a visit to park in the parking lot.

Secondly, women need a stronger support system. Unless you know other moms who are or have breastfed, you may find yourself alone. I know I was. I did get support from a friend living in the U.S. Neither my mother or my grandmother breastfed. In my grandmother’s day, women were encouraged to formula feed their child as the reasoning by doctors was that you knew exactly how baby was consuming. I couldn’t rely on the experiences of my mother or grandmother because they had none to give me.

Thirdly, society needs to change its attitude when it comes to breasts. We are told that breast is best. But then we are told, in subtle ways, that breastfeeding in public is something that needs to be done discretely or avoided all together. God forbid if you whip out your boob to feed your child while sitting on a mall bench and offend someone in the process. The way Facebook treats breastfeeding photos and images is a reflection how society views women and their anatomy. Why is it okay for Heidi Montag to show off the results of her new breast augmentation surgery on the cover of People Magazine, but images of nursing mothers and their babies are deleted from Facebook? Women shouldn’t feel like they need to hide in their homes or in a changing room store to breastfeed. I have used nursing rooms. They are wonderful things. But sometimes nursing rooms aren’t all that convenient, especially if you have a hungry infant on your hands and the nursing room is two floors up from where you are shopping. I’ve breastfed in public, and sometimes I wasn’t all that discreet as darling daughter would knock off the blanket covering her. And I always found those breastfeeding cover to be a pain and awkward to use. So I gave up and stopped worrying if I was offending someone when I was breastfeeding in public.

I believe time will change this. But time takes time. Hopefully this will won’t be an issue when my own daughter reaches her childbearing years.