Author Ray Bradbury pointed out, chillingly, “You don’t need to burn books to destroy a culture — just get people to stop reading them.” Similarly, you don’t need to actually ban nursing to decrease the incidence of breastfeeding — just make it more and more difficult to do.
The ways our culture makes breastfeeding ever more difficult range from the insidiously subtle (hospitals’ goody-bag full of formula) to the outrageously overt (Bill Maher’s infamous rant equating breastfeeding — “a private thing” — with “farting or masturbating or pissing”).
Bottled Up! from The Milky Way on Vimeo. (Includes the aforementioned Maher rant)
Image:
Mothering Touch used under its Creative Commons license
Tags: Andrea Potos, Bill-Maher, breast pumping, breastfeeding, cultural discourse, Facebook, Mama Eve, nursing, The View, Whoopie Goldberg
