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Green Party councillor Katie Dawson |
Women must fight for breastfeeding
Mothers and babies are being bullied out of the many benefits of breastfeeding
by a society that maintains its discomfort at something very natural and amazing, writes Katie Dawson
MY attitude towards breastfeeding is simple. It is best summed up in the following exchange, which took place shortly after I was elected as the first Green councillor in Islington.
My youngest child was four months old at the time, so he came with me wherever I went and fed as and when he needed to. A local journalist approached me at one council meeting and said: “Oh, I see you’re breastfeeding – is that because you’re a Green?” Without thinking I replied “No. It’s because I’m a mammal!”
The need to see breast-feeding as something worthy of comment has caused so many problems and led to many women giving up on feeding their babies naturally. Breastfeeding is simply what we have evolved to do in order to nurture our young. It is amazing and it is unremarkable.
The benefits of breast-feeding are well known:
* Human milk is the perfect food for human babies
* It is intensely bonding and allows the baby a period of transition between life in the womb and life outside.
* It is good for women and apparently protects against certain cancers.
* It is the ultimate convenience food – always at the right temperature, ready sterilised and creates no washing-up
* It is free!
Yet at six weeks old less than half of all babies in Britain are breastfed.
Obviously, some women are not able to breastfeed for very good reasons. But many more women who could feed their babies themselves choose not to for more complex reasons.
In my view it is the confused values of our society that are largely responsible for this state of affairs. We live in a culture where women’s bodies are sexualised to the extent that people feel perfectly comfortable with images of women’s breasts displayed on page 3, but often quite uncomfortable with the sight of a woman breast-feeding her baby. However wrong people might feel this is, it can be very hard to stand up to the mixed messages we are constantly drip-fed by a society whose values have become so skewed.
My own experience of breastfeeding each of my children on demand and in a wide variety of places has been overwhelmingly positive. One notable exception was on a ferry to the Isle of Arran – a member of the crew came over to me, as I sat drinking tea and feeding my daughter, and told me that there was a seat in the toilets if I wanted “to do that”. I’m ashamed to say that I was not polite. In fact, fuelled by hormones, my reaction was so visceral that the poor man looked genuinely scared. Not big and not clever of me, but I do think women need to be bold in asserting their right to do something so natural.
In some ways it is sad that we still need to have this debate – it shows how backward we are as a society.
We all need to grow up and let women get on with doing a job that their bodies are superbly designed to do.
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