Breastfeeding: get over it (The Daily Campus)
Friday Sep 7th, 2018
There has been a long standing stigma surrounding the topic of breastfeeding in public. People, most often men, have found this to be too tantalizing, sexual and overall distracting for them to go about their daily lives. Breastfeeding is a natural occurrence. It is a mother feeding her baby breakfast, lunch or dinner. Most people wouldn’t respond well if they were approached when eating and told that the way they were eating was too sexual or distracting and that they should eat somewhere “more private.” This is just a fraction of the nonsense people put breastfeeding mothers through.
Leana Wen, author of the article “Commentary: Breastfeeding Gets Personal For Public Health Advocate,” informs her audience that “Employers must also allow for sufficient time for mothers to pump. A friend who's a nurse told me that she can take two 30-minute breaks during her shift to pump, but her hospital's lactation room was two buildings away—a 10-minute walk each way". Walking ten minutes each way only allows this mother ten minutes to pump enough milk to feed her baby, which is an insufficient amount of time. This employer may think that he is being generous in giving this mother time to breastfeed, however what he actually has done was force this mother to give up on breastfeeding altogether. This is a choice that will negatively impact her child and herself.