Breastfeeding: The Battle To Feed In Public

This is the argument put forth by lactivists who say the public feeding debate is more concerned with controlling women’s bodies and boosting profits than it is about the health interests of infants. “What this really seems to be about, yet again, is policing women’s bodies, judging and thus controlling aspects of motherhood as well,” says Dr Karen Brooks, an associate professor at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies in Australia. “Setting conditions on what’s acceptable and unacceptable parenting has become a popular blood (or should that be milk?) sport.”

Evidently, everyone from private companies to governments seem to have an interest in how and when mothers should feed their children. In Mexico, the government recently announced a crackdown on giveaways of baby formula at hospitals and clinics in a bid to boost breastfeeding rates. Elsewhere, companies like Medela, which manufacture breast pumps and Prolacta Bioscience, which make nutritional supplements for infants from human milk, are funding breastfeeding research. While this isn’t to say such research is rigged, it does mean private companies have a vested interest in the outcome. According to Jung, such acts indicate nursing has become a commercialised business. With many businesses now profiting from the breastfeeding boom, some suggest devices like breast pumps are only encouraging women to feed their babies breast milk in a private setting or via bottle in public.

“Breastfeeding is normal. But, in a society that sexualises everything mammary, it appears we struggle when breasts are transformed from objects of femininity, sensuality and sexuality to a maternal and infant necessity,” says Brooks. Nevertheless, sexuality remains an integral component in the argument against public breastfeeding. But for lactivists, any sexual function a breast has comes secondary to their primary function – which is to feed young children. To argue otherwise is to support the patriarchal vision of women’s bodies as profit-making sex objects.