The National Childbirth Trust is the leading charity for pregnancy, birth and parenting in the UK. They work with government to help develop policy, campaign, run pre-natal classes and are a huge information resource for parents (amongst other things).
Currently they are running a campaign to shame employers who are unsupported of breastfeeding mothers. Companies that are nominated for a 'Booby Prize' (Do you see what they did there? etc) The aim of the campaign is to generate awareness to support a change in the law in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. To date, Scotland is the only part of the UK where the law supports a mother's right to breastfeed. In fact, it's actually an offence to stop a woman from breastfeeding in a public place. Presently, it is unlawful anywhere else in the UK to breastfeed a baby in public and you may be asked to stop.
1% of British women have a genuine physical reason why they cannot breastfeed yet 30% of all mothers do not attempt to do it and in the 'under 24 year-old' group, this rises to 40%, according to 2004 figures from the Department of Health. 67% of women believe that the general public find breastfeeding in public unacceptable yet 84% of the same general public have no problem with discrete breastfeeding. (I'm not quite convinced of those stats, since this requires 1,150 women to believe that the general public finds it unacceptable whilst simultaneously believing it's fine - making the admittedly rather large assumption that all men find public breastfeeding acceptable.)
Personally, I have absolutely no problem with it. It's neither erotic nor disgusting and I'm pretty much entirely unbothered by it. There is that thing of not wanting to stare at someone's breasts when you're sitting opposite them. It's not terribly polite to be gawping at your friend's chest under any circumstances and especially not when she's breastfeeding. It's not so much that you want to, it's just that breasts have optical gravity. They bend the light and it's really hard for a straight bloke not to be drawn to them even if he's genuinely not interested in her in that way. But, let's face it, you can't actually see anything even if you were that desperate - there's a baby and twenty layers of clothes between anything you could conceivably be interested in. It's probably the whole 'thou shalt not' effect as much as anything else. You remember when you were in class and someone whispered a joke? The fact that you weren't supposed to be laughing makes the joke fifty times funnier than it could be if it were told in the street. That's the 'thou shalt not' effect in action.
Suffice it to say, I think that if women need to breastfeed their babies in public, they shouldn't be forced to wait until they get inside or go and hang about in unhygienic public toilets in order to spare the blushes of someone who really should look the other way if they're so bothered. I certainly think that if the government feels so strongly about breastfeeding that it can run public health campaigns to extol the virtues of breastfeeding, it should also stop providing excuses for mums not to.
In summary then, I am in favour of more women getting their knockers out in public...
No, hang on... that's not what I meant.
It wasn't me who said that. The optical gravity made me say it like that.
Come back...
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