Breast issue

OH DEAR. Facebook has boobed again. You can take your company public, Mark Zuckerberg, just don’t try to stop mothers putting up breastfeeding pictures in a public place.

For the past few years, as regularly as a baby wakes in the night, Facebook has fallen out with those who post photographs of themselves feeding their children.

Two weeks ago, the company’s Californian headquarters and other offices, including London, were swooped on for a nurse-in by “lactivists” (lactation activists) after Canadian mother Emma Kwasnica said that the social networking site had labelled about 30 photos of her breastfeeding her daughters “obscene” and “sexually explicit”. (The site responded by saying that it recognises breastfeeding as “natural”, and it usually only takes action when someone else complains about a photo that shows a fully exposed breast.)

The row shows up how uncomfortable we still appear to be with breastfeeding – and not just in the United States but in Britain.

If the Inuits have different words for snow, the British have countless words for breasts – but still go collectively bright red at the thought of infant-feeding.

More than 35 years after Baroness Hayman became the first woman to breastfeed in the Houses of Parliament, and two years since the right to breastfeed has been explicitly protected in law, there are still regular accounts of women getting thrown out of pubs or libraries or off buses for feeding their babies.

I breastfed both of my children for a year, and consider such bullying completely unacceptable. Yet, I have to get this off my chest, I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes to be a lactivist.

These women have put together entire websites, promoting their cause with vigour and a lot of merchandise.

A “knittytit” hat (a beanie that looks like a nipple) for my baby to wear while feeding?

Only if I can wear fake spectacles and a false moustache so that no one will recognise me. Breast milk ice cream? Leaves me cold. There are three reasons why I breastfed. First, I was terrified of the tiny woman who ran my National Childbirth Trust antenatal class. Second, its enthusiastic promotion by some advocates appeared to suggest that breastfeeding produces a Nobel-prizewinning-olympic-gold-medallist-supermodel child, as well as providing me with a size zero figure (the first claim is undoubtedly true, looking at my children; the second turned out to be a big fat lie). And third – because I was lazy. Yes, that’s the awful secret. I weighed up whether I could live without wearing a normal dress for a year against having to get up in the night to wash bottles, sterilise them, measure out formula, re-sterilise bottles after sleep deprivation made me forget I’d done it already, scald my wrist attempting to get the warmth of the milk right and then drop the damn thing on the floor and have to start all over again. And no contest – laziness won.

But breastfeeding has become the lodestar of how middle-class mums judge their parenting skills. The “breast is best” brigade can overhype the merits of breastfeeding and appear so militant to those who fail, they end up seeming unbearably smug.

Forget the milk of human kindness; it’s express pumps at dawn, with some mothers even said to put “100% mummy milk” stickers on bottles to make it clear that their little darlings are not slurping down formula.

And those who formula-feed their babies all too often wrongly adopt an oppressed minority mentality (let’s not forget that only 3% of babies are breastfed for six months in Britain).

Wouldn’t it all be better if women stopped judging each other on whether they got a child to latch on and just tried to treat breastfeeding as a normal part of life – good if you can, not a disaster if you can’t?

After all, if you really want to get wound up by breasts, think of the fact that we live in a country where two out of three Hooters “breastaurants” are still open, Katie Price talks about implants on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, and The Sun’s editor can claim with a straight face that Page 3 is a good thing because it promotes “natural beauty”.

Now that’s really uplifting, isn’t it? — The Daily Telegraph UK