If you come to Idaho stay out of the libraries on friday. During story time at our small library you’ll see at least three mommies breast feeding. We bought rocking chairs to make them comfortable.
You, and others, have been claiming that public breastfeeding is done in the child’s best interest. They have to eat when they are hungry, immediately, apparently. Farmwoman’s post suggests other reasons, i.e., to to further a loony lefty political theory. It’s dishonest to insist that public breastfeeding is done in the best interest of the child, when that is not necessarily the case, at least as far as FW is concerned.
Lying liars and the liars who tell them, indeed.
actually, I’ve claimed nothing of the sort- merely that mothers have the right to feed their children in restaurants. gads what will us liberals demand next?
as for the ‘lie’, comment - you, along w/the rest who leap to use that word apparently have difficulty with the English language, since I’ve not posted anything that remotely constitutes a lie. I may disagree with your prudishness, but that doesn’t make me (or anyone else) a liar.
I hope I’m not repeating anyone, but the original story is unclear. Was the woman a patron/customer of the BK in question at the time? If not, she actually doesn’t meet the legal standing of having a right to be there in the first place. it is pretty accepted that you don’t have a legal right to hang out in a restaurant without buying something. She probably was a customer, but I hadn’t seen anyone else mention this as a possible issue.
As for “you have no right to be offended,” voices, please consider how hyprocritical and close-minded THAT is. I’m sure that you know that we have different cultures and different upbringings in this world. That doesn’t mean that we get to ACT on our worldviews in every instance. But to tell me that I may NOT be offended is about like saying I MUST believe such-and-such. I find that far more offensive than someone’s being disturbed by breast-feeding. Should they keep it to themselves if it bothers them? Legally, yes. If they don’t know the woman, again yes. But can any of us tell them that they have NO RIGHT to feel the way they feel? Try that shoe on the other foot; it’s quite uncomfortable.
once again - by poking fun at some one for being prudish about breast feeding, I don’t believe I’m telling them they’ve no right to feel what they’re feeling. They’re silly, yes, but they’ve got a right to be silly.
they can indeed ‘feel’ whatever they wish. However, their feelings don’t trump the need of a mother to feed her child.
Wrong milroyj.
I was feeding my baby in his interest. I chose to make a stink about illegal harrassment in the interest of society as a whole.
While I’m not going to compare myself to a Freedom Rider, it’s a little like the difference between sitting at the lunch counter because you’re hungry and want a burger and sitting there in the face of conflict because you want to affect change.
Most people consider me right of center.
No one has provided any evidence of a NEED to breastfeed a child in public, let alone in the fifteen minutes they are in a fast food restaurant. Can’t they breastfeed before, or after, in private?
Farmwoman, on the other hand, has provided evidence that public breastfeeding is not entirely done for nutritional reasons, but also to express her “feminism”. That’s the lie I was referring to, that it’s ONLY done for the child. Couch it in terms of “feeding the children” as much as you like, but some people are doing it to make a political point. LaLeche League, anyone, and their proposed “nurse-in”?
Nice way for them to use their own children to promote their beliefs, btw.
So if you folks are so upset about bare breasts, do you avoid beaches? Have you sworn off porn? Staying away from Renaissance paintings? If a pretty, braless girl’s blouse opens by accident on a windy day, do you avert your eyes in embarrassment?
Or if it’s the act of feeding that’s so disturbing, do you eschew the mammals at the zoo? Heaven help you if you happen across a display of bonobo, one of the great apes; I’ve seen females of that species engaging in autoerotic acts with great relish and no abandon.
It’s just so peculiar that people are perfectly fine with overtly sexual displays of female anatomy, but are offended by utilitarian acts. It just doesn’t make sense. Breasts are there for feeding babies.
I will agree that discretion is a good idea, as it’s always preferable to be discreet in public, regardless of the act in which one is engaged. Hardly any public behavior is improved by being made more blatant.
And breastfeeding at BK is indiscreet, at best.
milroyj, I’m wondering how you feel about public urinals. It seems their design makes it possible to catch a peek at another man’s genitals. Unless you think men should all just wait until they get home to pee in private.
And apparently gyms should never have showers.
What you’re not considering about the fast-food restaurant scenario is that it’s unlikely a mom left home with the express intention of going only to Burger King in order to tantalize fellow diners with her breastfeeding. It’s more likely that a mom would be running a number of errands and would make a beeline for a cheap restaurant when her baby showed signs of being hungry.
Well, that makes no sense, unless she is going to feed the infant Double Whoppers with Cheese. How about a beeline to a private place?
Sure milroy, because the world is just teeming with free, private, comfortable places open to any and all mothers who might want to come in to breastfeed their child. I’ve even heard they have free HBO and monkey butlers to serve frosty cold beverages.
Why don’t they feed the little rugrat, you know, at home? Monkey butlers optional.
Are you serious?
I do have to leave my house sometimes, you know. Hell, sometimes I go places just because I want to, with no pressing need involved. Do you really think when I’m out with my sons for a day of errands, or shopping, or just hanging out at the park, I’m going to drive thirty or more minutes home just to spend ten minutes feeding him? You honestly, in the most objective corner of your mind, feel like that is a reasonable request? Christ on a cracker man, that’s barely one step above the old belief that mothers and babies should never go anywhere.
If you really truly have such a problem with the thought that a breastfeeding mother might need to feed her child while she is out, I can’t help but think that you should perhaps consider relocating to somewhere like Afghanistan or South Asia–I hear they really know how to keep their women in line there… :dubious:
Yes they do. At my church, there is a little LED sign on the wall up above the choir. If a child in the nursery needs mommy, to eat or because they are otherwise inconsolable, the nursery workers put mommy’s assigned number up on the LED, and she knows to go to the nursery to attend to her child. There is a monitor in the nursery so that we are able to hear the service while we’re there.
However, there are more than a couple of women in my church who choose not to use the nursery, for whatever reason, and they have sat and nursed their infants right in the sanctuary. They took their cue on this directly from our pastor’s wife, who has done this with all of their children (up to about 6 months) with the support and approval of her husband. I am one of those mothers. My older child goes to the nursery now, but my son stays with me and if he starts to fuss, I will nurse him. I have had nothing but approval from others in our congregation for this, as well.
First of all, most nursing moms who drive alone with their babies plan the car trips around the times when they know the baby is going to eat.
This is one of the reasons why we nurse when we stop to eat lunch after running our errands, etc. We’re sitting, we’re somewhere reasonably clean, we’re relaxed (this is important for good flow of milk), we’ve got access to food and beverages (also important) and if it’s not the lunchtime rush, the chances are good that we’ll be able to comfortably spend the time that baby will need to get a good feeding before we get back into the car.
And once we’re in the car, if the baby is screaming and clearly in great distress because he’s hungry, the smart mother (who doesn’t want her child to suffer and wants to preserve her own hearing) will pull over and feed the baby. That’s just a no-brainer.
When I read stuff like “why don’t they feed their babies at home” and objections to stances like Farmwoman’s as some kind of “feminist” agenda-pushing, I become highly suspcious that the argument isn’t about the supposed “indiscretion” of public breastfeeding or about how “uncomfortable” it makes people, it’s about controlling women’s lives. It’s about telling women, mothers, that our place is not out in public. It’s about telling us that like our predecessors of old, who couldn’t even use words like pregnancy or breastfeeding, who spent the second halves of their pregnancies and first year of their children’s lives in societally enforced confinement, we need to be ashamed of reproducing and feeding and nurturing our children and need to keep all evidence of having done so behind closed doors.
No way I’ll ever stand for that. No way I’ll ever let anyone control my life in that way, to demean the care of my child in that way, to attempt to turn the clock back on all women in that way. No way will I ever let anyone tell me and my child that we are unwelcome in “polite” society.
However you want to label that stance, go for it. Labels don’t matter to me.
Troglodytic attempts to cloister me certainly do.
Well said TeaElle–I couldn’t agree more.
TeaElle said it beautifully.
Let me just add that yes, I have pulled over twice to feed my four-month-old, and once while my husband was driving and we were in a traffic jam, I fed her while she was still strapped into her carseat. Hungry babies demand to be fed, very loudly and persistently. Additionally, most babies have phases when they will eat, seem full, and then need to eat again within 15-20 minutes.
As Farmwoman and TeaElle have said, to avoid public breastfeeding, one has two options: formula, which is not recommended by the AAP, or total confinement within the home until the baby is at least six month old, which is rather insane in a society that supposedly treats women as equal human beings.
Eating in the nursery would meet the definition of nursery. But eating in the sanctuary??? How vulgar.
To wit:
“lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste: COARSE”
“morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate: GROSS”
“lewdly or profanely indecent: OBSCENE”
By the very definition of vulgar, breastfeeding in a church sanctuary is definitely coarse, most likely gross, and may or may not be obscene.
Oooh, then some churches better take down statues and paintings of the Madonna breastfeeding the Christ child!
:rolleyes:
Breasts are NOT obscene. THAT is what they are for-to feed a child. What could be LESS obscene than a mother feeding her baby?
I swear, some of you people have really dirty minds, you know that? Especially you, milroyj. What the hell is WRONG with you?
Those of you who feel the need to ask nursing mothers to hide in a closet somewhere, I have four words for you:
Grow. The. Fuck. Up.