My View on Public Breast Feeding | Teen Ink

My View on Public Breast Feeding

November 12, 2015
By _guti BRONZE, Plaquemine, Louisiana
_guti BRONZE, Plaquemine, Louisiana
3 articles 0 photos 3 comments

Breastfeeding should be accepted by society. Breastfeeding provides nutrition for babies and health benefits for the mother and the child. The cells, hormones, and antibodies in breast milk help protect babies from diseases. Research on breastfeeding suggests that it lower the risks of asthma, ear infection, eczema, type two diabetes, and etc. The health benefits for breastfeeding mothers are at lower risks of type two diabetes, certain types of breast cancer, and ovarian cancer.

In America, forty-nine states have laws that allow women to breastfeed in any place being private or public. Twenty-nine states exempt breastfeeding from public indecency and twenty-seven states have laws related to breastfeeding in the workplace. For a person to call this bonding moment between a mother and a child indecent is disrespectful.

I have witnessed someone frown upon breastfeeding. In 2011, my family stopped in the gas station and my brother who was four months old cried. As a motherly instinct, my mother grabbed on to him and began breastfeeding him. Six minutes later a police officer tapped on our window and asked her to cover up. My mother was puzzled since she believed she that her actions were not wrong. People are more offended about the boob hanging out than the actual breastfeeding itself.

Some mothers use a blanket to cover themselves herself while breastfeeding, but this is a bother to both the mother and child. My cousin’s wife never bothered to use a blanket, unlike my mother. We were gathered at a restaurant and did not hesitate to breastfeed her child. The men at the table were not fazed by this action. They didn’t notice this was going on and when they would talk to her they weren’t disgusted. The waiter didn’t think twice about her child latched onto her when he took her order.  Its 2015 where people can have Victoria Secret models in lingerie planted all over the mall and its perfectly fine, but if you see a mother breastfeeding her child under a blanket it's scandalous and outrageous.

Almost everybody as a baby was breastfed. This is not weird, disgusting, or indecent. This is an event that every mother with her child goes through, if the mother chooses to breastfeed her child. People suggest mothers using baby formula and breast pumps, but sometimes a mother would rather have this intimacy with her child. These mothers cannot have this with people staring at her chest with a child feeding with disgust written all over their face. People who are opposed to public breastfeeding treat them with the same respect that you expect, and help support laws that create private spaces for mothers to go instead of sitting in a toilet stall.



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