As far as I understand it, uptight people don’t want their impressionable children to see breasts, or consider the sight of a breast to be in any way normal - so that they can grow up to be uptight people just like their parents.
Ah, the Land of The Free ™ in action. The right to bear arms, but not to bare boobs.
If only more of today’s young women would engage in bold acts of civil disobedience to demonstrate solidarity with their childbearing sistren, I feel certain that these antiquated taboos would quickly fade away.
BINGO!
Hey, now. You show me the N.R.B.B.A.*, I’m there.
*National Right to Bare Boobs Association
Seriously, I think 22 months is pushing the limits, but also recognize that not all kids come from the same cookie cutter. What with airline restrictions on what you can carry (I seem to recall hearing in the news a little while back about a mother having to toss a bottle or two of breast milk due to DHS security regulations), I’m suprised there aren’t more incidents like the OP describes. Maybe there are and they just aren’t hitting the news.
And the “bathroom option” should, for very obvious reasons, be right out. Even if public places (airports, shopping malls, etc.,) came up with “Mommy Lounges,” I’d still be dubious, and I’m a guy.
The uptight should just get it into their heads that for tens of thousands of years, the female mammary was (and probably still is) the best food delivery system for getting grub into the little monsters.
22 months is not pushing the limits. The World Health Organization reccomends 6 months at the bare minimum, 2 years is reccomended.
Human breasts are also sexual organs.
If you do not agree with that statement, I feel sorry for the men in your life.
The breast has been turned into a sexual organ by tradition. It developed as a way to feed children. Society seems to want to ignore that aspect of it.
From a biological standpoint of the hominid breast, this isn’t really true. As Colibri mentions in this very relevent [post=7979314]thread[/post], the size and shape of human breasts clearly has a sexual impetus, as do those of the [post=7979892]bonobo[/post]. There’s more than just culture and tradition to the libedo attached to women’s breasts.
That’s it in a nutshell. As a side note, I’ve sat in services as a guest at a couple of very traditional churches (Quakers and Mennonites) where women (apparently) regularly breastfed during services. (Since these services are like three hours long one can understand why a feeding might come in the middle.) The women were reasonably discreet about it, using a blanket, but breast including nipple were visible, if briefly. Not one of these presumably religious and socially conservative people were in any way disturbed by this. It’s a natural biological perrogative and objecting to it out of some Victorian notion of propriety is absurd to an extreme. Next they’ll be saying that we can’t sneeze or yawn in public. :rolleyes:
Stranger
Ignoring the breastfeeding - a twenty two month old child should be strapped in its own seat during takeoff - preferably in an FAA approved seat. What she did was unsafe. The airlines will let you have a lap baby - but it isn’t smart.
And she refused to cover up. I think we have a lactivist trying to make a point, since - had she accepted the blanket from the flight attendant - we wouldn’t have a problem.
A twenty two month old child can certainly be breastfed - it should no longer be the primary means of nutrition. Most women I know who breastfeed past about eighteen months or so say they do it for comfort, not nutrition. The WHO recommendation does not assume a Western diet - where basic nutrition and food sanitation is problematic, breastfeeding should be maintained for as long as possible. I’d assume that in Vermont you don’t have the same nutrition issues you do in Camaroon and that you’d breastfeed primarily for comfort.
So are is the butt, and we don’t hear about flight attendants telling woment to cover their coin slot when wearing low riders.
I don’t think that taking offense with breastfeeding has much to do with religion. I’ve known religious women that breastfeed in public.
I know for a fact that my child would not like her face covered when breastfeeding, or at any time. The woman says she didn’t expose herself, but I am sure some boob was showing (not much if the nipple was inside the child’s mouth), still the flight attendant said “you are offending me”. How is that, how about just moving along and leave mother, child and husband sitting next to her alone.
Wow, what an impressive collection of mispellings in my previous post!
I didn’t see in the article where it said they were about to take off. And even if that’s the case it has nothing to do with my rant.
So any woman who refuses to cover her child’s face while breastfeeding is a lactivist?
Nope, not feeling outrage here.
It’s not too much to ask someone to discreetly cover up a wet boob, child attached or not. I agree about breastfeeding being preferable to bottles, etc. but this woman was out to make a scene. Most breastfeeding woman I’ve noticed usually use a light piece of fabric, a sort of oversized handkerchief thing, that functions as a tactful screen and burp-wiper-upper afterwards.
Much brouhaha over nuthin’, IMO. Nobody was persecuted and this dingbat managed to make breastfeeders look like idiots.
You have every right to feel as you please. We’ll just agree to disagree.
Have you come across any piece of information that the woman in question was not being tactful? All we have are her own words that she was not “exposing” herself. If you have please let me know.
My conclusions was not that the mother was a “dingbat” but that the attendant was an uptight bitch. Amazing how we can draw dramatically different conclusions from the same information. 
My best guess is that it had little to do with nursing and a great deal to do with extended nursing. The extremes to which people will go to let others know just how dreadful they think extended nursing is (extended nursing being apparently defined as anything beyond six weeks) have to be seen to be believed. I have been called a child molester by a complete stranger for the act of nursing a nine month old.
There are people who object to nursing in public at all, of course. But it’s the ones who are freaked out by nursing what they call older children who really go over the top.
I was somewhat bemused by the whole article in some ways, as my own experience is that you have to work pretty hard to actually see a person in an airline seat unless they are on the aisle.
I had one of those thingies you hang around your neck while nursing for Eldest. I brought it along to visit the in laws in Holland. My Mother in Law asked me what it was for. I told her. She didn’t believe me. She thought I was making it up and kept asking what it was really for. May I just say, having a nursing baby in Holland was about a gazillion times more pleasant than it was in the US.
I expect this is a function of, er, relative size. But by the time Youngest came along I had worked out that you can nurse more easily by unbuttoning your bottom buttons and not the top ones. Even unbuttoning the top ones was less exposure than I would get in an average swim suit, though. It isn’t as though you have to pull the girls out and wave them around to get them cranked up for heavens’ sake.
I can’t figure it out either, though. I can imagine few things less offensive than a nurseling.
Yeah, 'cause using one of those germ-covered, washed-at-the-beginning-of-every-fiscal-year blankets is healty for the baby.
Note that the article also states that she was in the second-to-last row, in the window seat, with her husband on the aisle. Not exactly in pole position, there, any anyone who say anything “indiscreet” could have simply done the adult thing and looked away. I’ve seen the “lactivist” contingent in action–seriously, breastfeeding a four year old, in public or not is a bit much, non?–but it hardly sounds like she was looking to create an incident, and she may have had reasons for not using a blanket. (I understand it disturbs some infants and they won’t feed while covered, or perhaps she had a blanket but it was tucked away in the overhead bin when Junior started crying for manna.)
Anything that keeps infants quiet on during air travel is okay by me. If that means I have to politely turn my head away from a breastfeeding child, meh. There’s little to be aroused about a new mother’s chewed-on nipple in any case. People who can’t deal with that need to find someplace real to pit their disapprobation.
Stranger
I truely don’t get it. Why am I supposed to be upset, or offended, by a woman breast feeding a baby. As far as my children seeing it, I think it’s a good thing, if it’s an issue at all. People who shield children from sexuality, or other natural life functions, are making a big mistake. What do you they intend to do, sit the kid down at (insert age) and explain everything to them at once? Makes no sense to me. It’s none of my concern that the woman needs to feed her child and if my child asks, I’ll explain it to them.
Get a life people.
I’m reading a lot of information in the article where Ms. Gillette is telling us what happened and no one else’s side of the story. I think Ms. Gillette’s story may be different than the flight attendant’s story - which we won’t hear because Delta won’t let her tell it.
Oh, from the article:
Well, kudos to the Busan Subway, then. Every station now has a poster prominently displayed announcing that it’s not only legal, but perfectly normal to breastfeed one’s infant in public. The drawing on the poster doesn’t have the mother covering up the child with a blanket or anything else.
Actually, I think that females should be legally permitted to breastfeed any male at any time under any circumstances. I’m almost 45, and I still love sucking tit. The “feeding” part is strictly optional, and based on individual tastes.
It’s not offensive at all. In fact, it’s pleasant, often for both parties (at least the way I go at it). Even Freud admitted to getting into it.
Well, just for the record, the OP story doesn’t have the whole picture.
(from here)
I’m sure there’s a lot of CYA in there, but to me it looks like Delta’s having a decent response to this and is thus not really deserving of such ire (as in being singled out in your OP title). The flight attendant who was so concerned about her own sensibilities, sure. Pit her all you want.
And re: this in the OP:
This is not a case of a 20 hr travel being unable to nurse. It is a (roughly?) 1.5 hour flight. When I flew last out of Logan Airport, the airline let me into their VIP lounge to nurse my toddler comfortably. I have never had trouble with extended nursing* in an airport or on a plane. Do you have any evidence for someone being forbidden to nurse for a 20 hr travelling time?
- Here that means nursing after 1 year.