NEW YORK — “I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third.
These readers weren’t complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a parenting magazine — yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains greater support from the government and medical community.This week, in fact, is World Breastfeeding Week, which begins today. And August has been designated as National Breastfeeding Awareness Month.
Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.
One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.
“I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. Ash, 41, nursed all three of her children but is cautious about breast-feeding in public. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.”
Another mother, Kelly Wheatley, wrote Babytalk to applaud the cover, because, she says, it helps educate people that breasts are more than sex objects. And yet Wheatley, 40, who still nurses her 3-year-old daughter, rarely breast-feeds in public, partly because her husband is uncomfortable with other men seeing her breast.
“Men are very visual,” says Wheatley, of Amarillo, Texas. “When they see a woman’s breast, they see a breast — regardless of what it’s being used for.”
Babytalk editor Susan Kane says the mixed response to the cover clearly echoes the larger debate over breast-feeding in public. “There’s a huge Puritanical streak in Americans,” she says, “and there’s a squeamishness about seeing a body part — even part of a body part.”
Kane says that since the August issue came out, the magazine has received more than 700 letters — more than for any article in years.
The evidence of public discomfort isn’t just anecdotal. In a survey published in 2004 by the American Dietetic Association, less than half — 43 percent — of 3,719 respondents said women should have the right to breast-feed in public places.
The debate rages at a time when the celebrity-mom phenomenon has made breast-feeding perhaps more public than ever. Gwyneth Paltrow, Brooke Shields, Kate Hudson and Kate Beckinsale are only a few of the stars who have talked openly about their nursing experiences.The social and medical debate has intensified. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently finished a two-year breast-feeding awareness campaign including a TV ad — criticized as over-the-top even by some breast-feeding advocates — in which NOT breast-feeding was equated with the recklessness of a pregnant woman riding a mechanical bull.There have been other measures to promote breast-feeding: last year, Massachusetts banned hospitals from giving new mothers gift bags with free infant formula, a practice some said swayed some women away from nursing.
Most states, including Florida, now have laws guaranteeing the right to breast-feed where one chooses, and when a store or restaurant employee denies a woman that right, it has often resulted in public protests known as “nurse-ins.” Last year, a nurse-in was held outside ABC headquarters in New York, when Barbara Walters made comments on The View seen by some women to denigrate breast-feeding in public.
“It’s a new age,” says Melinda Johnson, a registered dietician and spokeswoman for the ADA. “With the government really getting behind breast-feeding, it’s been a jumping-off point for mothers to be politically active.’’
