Breast is best, unless you want to fly Freedom Airlines.
On Oct. 13, Emily Gillette, 27, of Santa Fe, N.M., was ordered off a Freedom Airlines plane about to take off from the Burlington airport after a flight attendant asked her to cover up while she was breast-feeding her year-old daughter.
Emily was feeding her 22 month old daughter according to this blog. A year or 22 months? Well, a toddler of 22 months is still a year old. I was still breast feeding my daughter when she was 23 months old. There are pages and pages of discussion on this if you Google "Emily Gillette".
A commuter airline has disciplined a flight attendant who ordered a passenger off a plane for refusing to cover herself with a blanket while breast-feeding her toddler, the airline said Friday.
I am spluttering and speechlessly angry again. Lactivists across America have staged "Nurse-ins" by Delta Airlines check in counters.
Given Americans’ predilection for sex and violence in their entertainment, it is astonishing that someone might be so offended by a discreetly nursing baby that the only solution is to remove an entire family from their flight.
45 American states protect a mothers right to breast feed her baby on demand, the UK actively promotes breast feeding. I have never had any problems feeding my kids in public, but I know people who have. It’s ridiculous. A mother has the right to breast feed her child wherever she needs to. I found this anecdote online too. (Slightly changed so people can’t be identified)
When my daughter was about 3-4 months old, a friend of mine and I were at out having lunch one day, and my daughter, too, decided it was time for her to have lunch as well…
So, I pulled her out of her car seat and began feeding her….
Now, mind you, she was definitely a card carrying member of the "Breast is Best" club. This child refused ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that didn’t come directly from my breasts… and I mean EVERYTHING…. this child wouldn’t even drink MY milk from a bottle… oh no… it was directly from the source or not at all….. this child wouldn’t even suck on a pacifier…. and one other thing… she never liked to have her head covered up, therefore there was no being "discreet" either. If I tried to cover her up, she would reach up and pull the cover off of her head, so she could look up at me!
So, anyway, we were eating lunch, and it was time to nurse my daughter as well, so I picked her up and began nursing her…. I did however keep my shirt pulled down to her face so that I didn’t actually have any of my breast exposed….
The lady sitting at the table next to me "politely" asked me, "Would you mind taking your baby into the bathroom to do that."
I looked her right in the eye and said, "No, I don’t mind at all….." and I stood up with my daughter still latched on and then, as I walked past this "nice" lady’s table, I "politely" picked up her plate and told her, "C’mon, we can make a party of it." I wasn’t rude about it… it was an honest and sincere invitation….
OMGOODNESS… you’d've thought I had told her the sky was falling or something….
She looked up at me and asked me just what exactly it was I thought I was doing…
I simply explained to her that I was taking her plate with me to the bathroom where she could join us to eat.
She got this major look of disgust on her face and told me how rude and disgusting I was to dare think SHE would go sit on a toilet to eat…..
I then said, "If the toilet isn’t a good enough place for YOU to sit and eat, then WHY pray tell, would you possibly think that it would be good enough for my BABY?"
Feed someone in a TOILET??? I think not. Yet this is no isolated incident. It happens all the time. Is this the sexualisation of the breast as the Lactivists claim? Or is it more that women are reclaiming their breasts for their intended purpose? Is it more that men don’t like to realise that our breasts are not for them. My breasts are small and they fed my children admirably. They are the mammary gland, they make milk for human babies. It’s what they do and they do it so very well in most cases.
I’m not going to go off on a pro-breast feeding rant because that’s not my soap box. Mine is that women should have the CHOICE to breast feed if they want to. A woman should have the support to feed her child as best she can and not be demonised for making the "wrong" choice. Sadly society (and Freedom/Delta airlines) are not supporting that choice.
Did I say speechlessly angry? Well, clearly not completely speechless but not as articulate as I would like.
