Gordon Clay here. What is it about breast-feeding and breasts that is so repulsive to so many people? My mother was a registered nurse and was advised to breast feed for one-month and that was it. Few women in the United States breast-feed more than six months, though the world average is 4.6 years, with some still breast-feeding long after that.
It wasn't that long ago in Santa Cruz, California that men had to wear one-piece swim suits to cover their breasts.
Now, 75 years later, a female flight attendant had a passenger removed from a flight because she was uncomfortable. In some states, public breast-feeding still falls under public indecency laws and could draw prison time. Even Facebook is afraid someone might turn to stone if they see a child being nursed on their service. Then, there's the Starbucks manager in Silver Spring, Maryland who illegally directed a breast-feeder to take her baby into the bathroom because another customer was uncomfortable.
Can you imagine being asked to take your baby into a "public" rest room, where sanitary conditions are suspect, to breast feed, or hide your child under a blanked where it cannot connect with the mother's face?
With all this angst, fewer and fewer children are receiving the healthy nourishment that formula cannot provide, just because our cultural stigma concerning breasts.
Yet the women and men of Mali, Ethiopia and Nigeria, see the breast solely as a nurturing tool for children and think that making it a sexual object is unnatural and perverted.
When you get over seeing a woman breast-feed in public, the next hurdle will be lactating fathers. Think about that!