Your View On BREASTFEEDING In Public (page 8)

Tuesday

Honey, we're not talking high school bathrooms here. Though I can't recall any such care being taking with the cleaning of the restrooms at my high school
.....Unfortunately, I have rarely been in public restrooms where the keepers were so conscientious. Most of them are hellious affairs with dirty tissue strewn everywhere, shit smeared every-damn-where INCLUDING splattered on the walls (good luck trying to find a clean bowl to sit your ass down on), and used maxi pads and tampons thrown willy-nilly all over the place. None of the aforementioned is exactly odorless.

And I've been in public restrooms that were regularly cleaned and were sparkling clean. I didn't clean High School bathrooms, I used to clean office bathrooms, and workplace bathrooms including fast food places and supermarkets. I said I used to clean them when I was in High School. I remember going into one rest area on a long road trip where the bathroom was cleaner than my home bathroom and it was cleaned every 2 hours by regulation with a mandatory spraying of some sort of apple cinnamon scent. Plus now every bathroom I've been in recently has that automatic sprayer. So you've been in dirty bathrooms before, and I've been in clean ones, does that make my point any less valid that once again if you're "eating in the bathroom" you're not eating off the bathroom.

I REFUSE to take my child into such filthy surroundings and attempt to sit down (scratch that-- I mean, balance on a nasty toilet bowl) and try to "relax" for a feeding--and let's not forget the woman in the neighboring stall with the running shits squirting and funking up the entire area

right... but you'll take him to a public park with just as much foulness, and you'll relax on the public bench there which the only thing that cleans them is the rain. I guess the neighboring smelly homeless person is a much better neighbor to be breastfeeding in front of, without the stall door there of course.

And the car? HA HA HA....in 98-degree weather? How about how hot a car gets sitting out in a vast, bare concrete parking lot? And I'm supposed trek 1,000 miles from the mall to the car in the hot blazing sun, kid screaming all the while, and then wait for the A/C to kick in while my baby is screaming for food?

Once again this is an issue of I think us going to completely different places because all the stores be it Target, Walmart or the Malls all have parking for people with infants, and they're right next to the handi-capped spots literally right outside the door. To me it seems about convinience. Mary put this in a previous post on this issue:

Breasts, and breastfeeding, are natural.
So is going to the bathroom, but I wouldn't appreciate it if someone did it in public right in front of me.

I guess I could make the same argument there about the dirty disgusting public restroom that "I REFUSE", and so forth. Or if I were an insulin dependant diabetic, I could refuse to go into a bathroom or my 98 degree car to give myself my insulin and say it's a life and death situation for me so if someone is offended at my bare ass in public too bad. Now I know alot of diabetics and they're pretty discreet about it, they don't just drop their pants, but in general I think it could be the same concept. They don't want to have to trek into the bathroom to give themselves their shot, and they don't want to walk the "1000 miles" to their car (which there are no "parking for diabetics" spots anywhere I've checked). It's easier to do it in public, and if there's an easier option then people will generally go with the easier option.

I have breastfed my child in restaurants, in stores, everywhere. I always had a nice-sized blanket or a big fabric sling that allowed me to pull up the excess fabric around us. I get so sick of the "whipping-it-out", I have rarely seen any women "whip it out" when it was time to feed her baby. Not saying it doesn't happen, but I've never personally seen that. Most of us are just trying to handle our business and get our babies fed with a mininum of fanfare.

And again, everyone here that said it would offend them has said that if they're discreet no one has a problem with it. I said that if a woman suddenly pulled her breast out next to me it would make me uncomfortable. No matter how much you say "it's natural" if a woman pulled out her breast next to me it would make me uncomfortable. Sorry I'm being honest, would I complain to someone; no I wouldn't do that. But I would at least walk away.

minimus

The consensus is: breastfeed with discretion. Whipping out the nursery is not quite polite in my opinion. I think that rather than think a mom has the "right" to breastfeed (which she does), consideration should be given to others feelings.I don't think the public act of breatfeeding is necessarily the issue. It's that some folks might be a bit uncomfortable to see an exposed breast in public view......Plus I wonder, ould it be that exposing one's breast might be ILLEGAL in certain places????

rebel8

Seeing someone breastfeed makes me instantly nauseated, so much that I am avoiding reading the rest of this thread.

It is tolerable if she covers herself, which should present absolutely no problem. Throwing a sweater on is not burdensome.

There are lots of natural things we don't *have* to do in front of others.

minimus

I agree about the "natural" thing. There's plenty of "natural" things we keep under wraps.

FlyingHighNow

Once again women are sexually objectified...as if women's bodies are only for sex. Whether it is her mouth, hands, breasts, vagina, buns or backside, all of these parts serve other more important purposes and functions than sexual gratification.

I breastfed where ever we happened to be if my children were hungry. It was nice to go to the mother's room during meetings and conventions though. A very good excuse for breaks. But if I needed to, I fed them right during the meeting or session without moving. The reason I used a blanket to cover myself was because I didn't want to give some nosey brother or sister a cheap thrill. Let them go get their kicks somewhere else.

I saw an entire breast out at a restaurant one day. The woman looked exasperated with her clueless husband and family.

found-my-way

If one finds it nauseating to see someone feeding their baby, why is it that the mother should inconvience herself and her baby by suffocating her baby with a sweater?

People do have the ability to look away. If it bothers you, DONT LOOK. simple as that.

Telling mothers what to do with their babies when it comes to a very loving and very normal practice is nauseating.

under_believer

Tuesday, you've gotten off on a tangent. The point is that most mothers feel it to be demeaning to be asked to go ANYWHERE special to feed their babies. Being asked to go a place specifically designed for shitting in, no matter how clean it is kept, just is adding insult to injury. The comparison between breastfeeding and injecting oneself with medicine to deal with a life-threatening disease is particularly inept.

The point, as I tried to make it in my last post, is that nobody should be required to "cover up" when feeding their children, just to avoid offending some neurotic weirdo who gets physically sick at the sight of someone being a good mother, or to keep some oversexed misogynist pig from being inconvenienced by his boner, or to prevent some withered old harridan from being filled with righteous indignation because her Victorian-era morals are being challenged. Covering up implies that there is something dirty or offensive about feeding one's children; there is not.

The only time a woman should cover up when feeding her child is when she herself feels uncomfortable, or is MADE uncomfortable by the outdated, offensive reactions of others. The point is that it is HER choice to do this.