Breastfeeding, Shift of Importance From Breasts to Feeding Infants
In this day and age, when lingerie stores can flaunt their prized exhibits, but a breastfeeding mother is directed to the toilet for the task, remembering the Breastfeeding Week August 1st to 7th becomes mandatory. This article talks about the need for de-sexualising a feeding process which plays the essential part of development of a child.
National Guidelines on Infant and Young Child Feeding, Government of India state these beautiful lines that strengthen my point here. “Breastfeeds should be given as often as the baby desires and each feed should continue for as long as the infant wants to suckle”.
I think we all can agree that the babies call the shots of when and where this happens. A public place, crowded place or any place other than home will not be a botheration for their hunger cries. After all it is their basic human right to be fed and that of the mother too to feed their baby.
The when and where factor dug in deep calls for a hygienic and a clean environment for the feeding session. So, the most recommended ‘toilets’ are not the best solution nor stand as the best example of a hygienic place. Diaper changing stations do not adhere to breast feeding requirements and public places need to focus on the difference.
Babies enjoy the right to be breastfed by compulsion through World Health Organisation, Government of India, Ministry of Women and Child Care etc up to 2 years of age. With complimentary food adding on slowly as the child grows. But the stress on breast milk and its need to avoid malnutrition is expressed all through out their detailed guidelines.
On demand feeding, comfortable position, proper attachment for suckling, hygienic environment and long hours of sitting till the baby decides they are full is the complete cycle of how one breastfeeding session goes. A comfortable seating availability, pleasant atmosphere, clean surroundings away from disregarding humans is closer to a kind gesture we can offer them at least.
Imagine sitting on the toilet, eating your food and drinking your carbonated drink, while people do their business around you in that closed place. Being a germaphobic I am unable to type beyond that descriptively imaginative sentence. To top that, expecting the lactating mothers to feed their child in such a scene is an example of being derogatorily insensitive. People always go for the outward appearance of a situation or a part rather than the innate beauty and responsibility it holds.
Breasts are not only a set of fatty fittings on a body, that are over sexualized but they also hold the lactating organs covered in health. Shaming mothers who are breastfeeding in public, shunning a picture of a mother breastfeeding her baby, encouraging a taboo over such a necessary aspect of a human’s growth just because it has got to do with a female body is an act beyond humanity and compassion.
Slapping people with government guidelines for allowing a baby be fed in a public place on demand, shows the shameful levels we are reducing ourselves to. Government and child care global organisations campaigning a sensitization drive with speeches and modules of execution on discrediting the stigma over breastfeeding seems a sensible move to enlighten the masses, both educated and uneducated alike.
Controversy of a magazine cover page of a woman breastfeeding a baby made a sensation like the iconic moment in the Australian Parliament when a senator breast fed her baby during an ongoing parliament session. Larissa Waters was being given a cold-shoulder over her “excuses of having to breast feed her child in the middle of legislative sessions”, and her response was doing it during it.
Why did both these incidents made headlines in the consecutive years of 2017 and 2018? Why did both these women and the people who supported this had the same thing to say? “What is a big deal about breast feeding a baby?” Thousands of miles apart, in two different hemispheres, on two different platforms, centuries after evolution, from two varied worlds of development and one year apart they still were mothers, still had to feed the hungry baby their essential food of their lives. Nothing has changed.
Government of India through its laid down guidelines with the help of the Indian Paediatrics Association urged the media, celebrities, known persons to propagate breastfeeding and stand in support of the better health of the mothers and future children of the nation. Stressing on the awareness to familiarize people on many occasions, over the importance of feeding the baby with milk rather than the focus on the organ that does it, is to be endorsed.
Wishing Everyone an Acknowledged Breast Feeding Week of 2020.
Thank you!!