It’s ok with me if a childless woman shows her nipple but I don’t make the laws.
The point is that it’s necessary for a mother to feed her baby. It’s not necessary to avoid offending uptight idiots.
Exactly. I have no problem with breastfeeding in public, only with the twisted logic some people use to justify a ban on nudity in all cases except breastfeeding.
If, in fact, there is a good reason to have laws against nudity, there must be some negative consequences of nudity, right? How does the presence of a baby negate those consequences?
It doesn’t matter whether the act is intended to be erotic, because even nudity without erotic intent isn’t allowed (except in this specific case, apparently).
Of course it’s necessary for her to feed the baby somehow, but there’s more than one way to accomplish that, and more than one place to do it. It’s possible for a mother to feed her baby and avoid offending uptight idiots, just as it’s possible for someone with a suspended license to meet his court appointment without driving a car.
I feel validated as a person. Esprix has linked to my pit thread.
<Devil’s advocate>
A lot of these arguments for breastfeeding in public can also be used to defend urinating down a public storm drain. Why shouldn’t we allow it?
It is a necessity. If I’m on a public street, and I have to go, why can’t I just whip it out and piss down the drain? Certainly I shouldn’t have to go into a bathroom because some people are uncomforable with it. If they don’t like to see my privates in public, that’s their own darn fault. What’s more important? Me relieving myself as to not cause permanent damage to my internal organs and ruining a good pair of pants, or someone else’s “comfort?” If you have a problem seeing my do a very natural thing, then you are a jerk. And it isn’t like I’m exposing myself like a hobo in a trenchcoat. They’re doing it for erotic reasons. I’m certainly not. It’s not like when I pee down a drain I want you to look at me. If you have a problem seeing the male anatomy, you can just turn the other way? Also, don’t pull out the unsanitary argument on me. A public storm drain surely isn’t unsanitary, and it’s not like you’re going to eat off it. Besides, it’s going down to the sewer anyway.
</Devil’s advocate>
Well that’s certainly a stupid devil. Besides the sanitation and smell issues of pissing in the street, there’s a bit of diffence between genitals and a breast.
Public breastfeeding has never been illegal in this country. As I understand it, the recent flurry of laws passed to exempt the nursing pair from indecency laws do not legalize NIP, they simply clarify the point that nursing in public is in no way indecent.
Women’s right to feed their children in any place where women and children are allowed stands whether or not the state has passed a law to clarify the point.
You sound like you have a beef with nudity laws, or at least with our present definition of ‘indecent’. I’m not a law-talkin’ person, but I have no problem making a distinction between a drunk college student hoisting her shirt on a street corner and a mother flashing some areola during latch while sitting on a mall bench.
shrug.
Some could argue that neither is inherently indecent, but the law seems to disagree at this time.
Aiming at nursing mothers’ rights (civil rights in New York State) to feed their children in public as a way of protesting perceived hypocrisy in the law is a little like bitching against handicapped parking spaces when complaining about your long walk from the car to the office building. Fair does not mean equal, it means everyone gets what he or she needs.
Now, I’m not suggesting that nursing mothers are handicapped, but we have been the target of discrimination in recent years. This is the reason for our ‘new’ breastfeeding laws. People need to know that it neither our laws nor our society deems breastfeeding indecent or lewd, despite what a few loud kooks have to say. It is not acceptable to tell a nursing mom to ‘take it outside’ or cover up, or go to a separate room, or use a bottle or whatever. Since the nursing pair must be treated as a unit during breastfeeding, to do so would be to exclude the mother from places where mothers and children could ordinarily go…and that is discriminatory.
And to argue that we choose this behavior is simply disingenuous. I did not choose to be born female of a lactating species. I just got lucky. Far from feeling like we can get one over on the law by showing our boobies in public, most nursing moms cite this issue as the single most stressful aspect of breastfeeding their children. Most advocacy groups cite the NIP issue as pivotal in our fight to normalize nursing and raise our US rates up from our present dismal rates of about 3% nursing for the first year.
Why don’t you focus your argument against nudity laws in general instead of taking aim at nursing mothers, whose rights were never in question in the first place?
Then surely you should have no problem explaining what part of that difference makes one OK to look at (in some circumstances) and the other so horrible that it must be banned. And also, why it’s still illegal to expose breasts (in all other circumstances) if they’re so different from genitals.
Don’t worry, I haven’t aimed at their rights. They should have the same rights to expose their breasts in public as everyone else.
The handicapped parking space analogy is a pretty poor one. Let me make it a little more appropriate:
Suppose your town passes a law requiring everyone to park at least 100 yards away from the entrance to a building. The law’s purpose applies just as much to handicapped people as to anyone else - let’s say it’s to increase security, so people can’t blow up a building with a car bomb.
Now suppose there’s an exception for handicapped people, who get to park right next to the door. Isn’t it just as easy to hide a bomb inside a car with a handicapped sticker as in any other car? Someone who supports both the law and the exception is a hypocrite - the law is meant to increase security, but the exception defeats that purpose.
And so it is with indecent exposure. The (misguided) purpose of the law–to protect poor, innocent prudes from the awful sight of the human form–applies to breastfeeding mothers just as much as everyone else. The difference is that while a handicapped person may not be able to travel 100 yards from his car to the front door, breastfeeding mothers can feed their children in other ways, at other times, or in other places, if they choose to.
Do you have evidence that laws against nudity didn’t actually outlaw breastfeeding-related nudity, before these changes were made? That is, evidence that the changes have no actual effect?
You choose to have kids, and you choose when, how, and where to feed them. If you’re ever breastfeeding in public, you’re there because of a series of choices you made.
I’m not taking aim at nursing mothers, only drawing attention to the fact that defenses of their nudity (“get over it, it’s the human body, you can just look away”) apply equally to everyone, nursing or not.
Public nudity doesn’t bother me. You’ll find no double standard here (but piss in a toilet for God’s sake!)
Whilst the arguments for breastfeeding wherever and whenever are persuasive, I think this lady has taken it a little too far.
Someone who genuinely believes she can breastfeed whenever
How does this fit in with those that argue ‘when baby needs feeding, it needs feeding NOW!!’
From the aforementioned cached essay from hipMama (I wrote to Gwen, and she doesn’t have her marvelous essay online anywhere right now…but she may put it back up in the future. I’m only quoting excerpts):
And again…
“Why are you quoting from someone else’s essay?” Because she says it more eloquently and amusingly than I could. I mean, come on, people - pissing in public is to breastfeeding as shitting in your purse is to taking home a doggy bag. Comparing the two is ridiculous.
ianlyte I don’t believe the operator of a vehicle traveling 65 miles an hour should be allowed to eat and drive at the same time. Passengers eating, fine, but not the operator. If the baby wants to eat, and the breastfeeding mother is not the driver, than she should find a way to feed the baby while it’s safely strapped into the carseat.
Zabali_Clawbane: You’ve obviously never tried to breastfeed a newborn.
Um, yes KellyM I have. I breastfed both my babies for as long as possible. (I had to get back on my medicines, so couldn’t breastfeed as long as I would have liked, but they still got several months each.) You, obviously like to jump to conclusions that are erroneous based on very little information. Try to break yourself of that habit.
It is possible (if you are large breasted at least) to get a breast to a baby and nurse it while it’s still in the carseat. Not at all comfortable, but possible. Of course, it’s much more preferable to pull the car over somewhere and park so you can take the little one into your arms to feed them. This is what we most often did.
Also, maybe mom (if possible) could express some breast milk, and bottle feed (if baby will take a bottle) the child if the trip is going to be very long, and cut into a time when the baby normally wants to eat. This isn’t always a doable thing, hence my post above.
It’s not possible to breastfeed an early infant while the infant is in the car seat, unless you have nozzlenipples on your breasts or something. And lactation consultants generally advise against using a bottle for expressed milk in newborns to avoid nipple confusion (bottles are easier to nurse from than breasts and if you give bottles to a newborn you may have serious difficulty getting them to latch to a breast after that).
KellyM I’ve done it. It IS possible, though not at all comfortable. (And I don’t have “nozzle nipples” I leaned and contorted myself to get the nipple to my child.) I know very well what La Leche League recommends, and also what the lactation consultant told me in the hospital both times around.
Pay attention! Maybe not everyone can get the nipple to the babe’s mouth, but I did. As far as giving a breastfeeding baby a bottle, that’s a judgement call up to each mother, and also based on whether or not baby will accept one.
When I had to stop nursing my babies to start taking my medications again, I chose the Playtex line of bottles, the kind with the bottle liners, that are human nipple shaped and easy to get the air out of. I do know what I’m talking about here.
KellyM I’ve done it. It IS possible, though not at all comfortable. (And I don’t have “nozzle nipples” I leaned and contorted myself to get the nipple to my child.) I know very well what La Leche League recommends, and also what the lactation consultant told me in the hospital both times around.
Pay attention! Maybe not everyone can get the nipple to the babe’s mouth, but I did. As far as giving a breastfeeding baby a bottle, that’s a judgement call up to each mother, and also based on whether or not baby will accept one.
When I had to stop nursing my babies to start taking my medications again, I chose the Playtex line of bottles, the kind with the bottle liners, that are human nipple shaped and easy to get the air out of. I do know what I’m talking about here.
Here’s what kept popping into my head, over and over, as I read this:
Men spend their whole lives trying to see boobies.
Women have boobies.
What the hell is the problem with breastfeeding?
PS: I’d be giddy if I could walk around topless on a hot, summer day, like my fiance can. WTF can’t I?
Of course it’s ok with you if a childless woman pulls her tit out in a public place, I already came to that conclusion oh dull blade. Maybe the child has needs, maybe its running a fever and it needs its temperature checked. Why not whip out an anal thermometer and stick it in the kids ass right at the table? That might fall under your category of visual delights as well, right? :wally
:eek:
What are you a contortionist? IIRC, it was highly recommended, (and isn’t it mandatory nowadays?), that the infant be placed in his carseat BACKWARD and in the backseat.
Unless the mother is putting herself at risk, (leaning over the back seat upside down and dangling the nipple in front of the infant (Zabali how TALL are you?, cuz that wouldn’t work with most of us average height girls), I can’t see how it would, in most cases, be physically possible.
That said, and all the “is it legal, should it be illegal” arguments aside, I have a hard time believing, that in this day and age of poop/fart/detailed sexual humor hitting us from every type of medium…
That someone would be so prissy and ridiculously offended by a possible momentary flash of nipple (if it’s done right, no one has to see a thing), and the sight of a lump of baby nursing under a blanket.
I mean, sheesh, how whiny, pretentious and pathetic does one have to be to be not just “offended” by this, but put off of their food??