American Girl has issued a statement regarding the recent mistreatment of a breastfeeding mother in an NYC store.

American Girl has issued an official statement regarding the recent mistreatment of a breastfeeding mom shopping in their NYC store this past weekend. Joanna DiCarlo was told to stop nursing her baby in a sitting area of the store. She then moved to the fitting room where employees loudly talked about her outside the door. Continue reading »

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Gasp! Don't you know what she DOES with that thing!?

This story at Lisa Belkin’s NYT Motherlode blog about a woman whose co-worker reported her for stashing her breast pump under her desk (in a nondescript black case) made my blood pressure spike up a few dozen points. In the mom’s words:

I share an office with someone who works from home many days a week.  I have a pump in a black bag.  I had the bag on the floor, but not fully under my desk, top part unzippered so that empty bottles were visible.  This resulted in a complaint to HR by my office mate (with whom I have a superficially friendly relationship) that it made her uncomfortable.  She wants to not have to see the black bag because it grosses her out.

Many of the comments to the piece could be summarized as “WTF?” and they seemed mostly supportive of the mom in question. One commenter did make this observation, though: Continue reading »

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Is Breastfeeding a crime?

Here we go again!  This week a New Jersey mother enjoying donuts, and coffee with a friend and their children had the police called on them for breastfeeding in public.

While there are several conflicting reports of the story, the mother involved shared her tale on the popular website for mothers Cafemom, a story which has since been removed. Continue reading »

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Ready for lunch?

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends mothers breastfeed for twelve months.  As Heather Turgeon tells us, three out of four new mothers in the US start to breastfeed, but by six months, almost 80 percent have stopped.  Statistics vary by state (in Oregon 60 percent of moms are still breastfeeding at six months while in Louisiana the six month number is 20 percent), but the bottom line is while some breastfeeding is happening, the AAP’s year-long recommendation is too long.

It would seem that after the initial period of is-that-baby-latched, following through with breastfeeding baby to the second half of the first year wouldn’t be so hard.  And yet, it was hard for me, and clearly I wasn’t alone. Why is that?

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I’m not saying I should have, but I did. Which is maybe why, after two months of peeking in and out of bathroom stalls trying to feed my kid, I was told I wasn’t producing enough milk. Or, more precisely, I was scolded in a thick French accent by a doctor who was subbing for my pediatrician at the time. ”Your babee is zo skinee! You’re not making enough milk!” she shouted as she poked my breast with her index finger. ”Do you use ze pump?!” I told her that I had a hand pump, but it didn’t really work and that I couldn’t afford a hospital-grade mechanical one. ”Okay zen,” she replied. ”You need to feed ‘er formulyuha!” I nodded silently, a bit teary from the shock. Realizing I was overwhelmed, the doctor then smiled and said, “Your daughter is beautiful. Let’s ‘elp ‘er gain some weight.”

That night, I told my husband we’d have to start feeding the baby formula. He glared at me with disdain. ”What is wrong with you?” he menaced. He meant what was wrong with my body and why was it ruining our plan to breastfeed — for free. I felt like a failure for not being able to provide my daughter with the milk my body is supposed to naturally give, but let me say this: If my own husband was not able to support me without shame in the feeding of our daughter via bottle, how can we rightfully expect a society that objectifies breasts as sex objects to support and understand breastfeeding?  I didn’t understand breastfeeding while I was doing it, and I know I’m not the only one.

I was very hurt by what my husband said to me — it was just one of his many extraordinary betrayals. But it left me wondering for a moment if there really was something wrong with me, something inherently sub-par about my womanhood. Did I just not try hard enough to breastfeed? I never really did go for the football hold. Maybe if I’d tried standing on my head? Or if I’d only asked my friends who pitched in to buy the baby a play mat to get me the Medela Freestyle Hands-Free Breast Pump for $379.99 instead? If ten people each chipped in 38 bucks …

I fear that breastfeeding in this country, at least when it’s difficult, is only for the wealthy. If breastfeeding comes easily to you, that’s wonderful. But if for some reason you’re not producing enough milk or you can’t get your baby to latch on, your ability to breastfeed often depends on whether you have the cash to spend on some seriously pricey equipment or a private lactation consultant or donated breast milk available online at a premium. And if you ain’t got the do-re-mi for that kind of luxury, you’re not participating in the breastfeeding movement, and therefore you’re less apt to understand it. Eh voila, that leaves us with a group of working-class Americans who feel just like Kim Kardashian, a single girl without a child, who recently infamously tweeted “EWW!” at the site of a woman breastfeeding in a restaurant. By which she presumably meant, what is that boob doing in here and why is it feeding a kid when you could be using a bottle? And yes, I know — first hand — formula is expensive, too. But it’s much easier to drop $25/week on Enfamil when you live check-to-check than it is to find $400 up front.

Continue reading »

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Trying to go to the bathroom in a tiny public stall with your toddler in tow is never easy. Now throw in a baby who you’re breastfeeding, and it sounds like you’re well qualified to take some time in the larger “handicap” stall, right?

Maybe not. A mom who posed this question on an Australian parenting site got a lot more than she bargained for – more than two hundred seventy folks in a hot debate over “can she” or “can’t she.” Continue reading »

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The boob brouhaha over at Facebook might land the social networking company in legal hot water.

Remember the whole push to make Facebook realize breastfeeding was natural and not obscene? It came to a head in late 2008 with a nurse in right at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters to gain women the right to keep their breastfeeding photos on the site. Continue reading »

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