Moms in Britain are fed up. Earlier this month, after she was told to quit breastfeeding her baby in a cafe, Claire Jones-Hughes invited other moms to join her in a
breastfeeding flash mob.
As the founder of
Brightonmums.com, Jones-Hughes happened to have a huge network at her fingertips. She chose a public venue to drive home the message: moms are sick and tired of being told to cover up when nursing.
"After being verbally attacked for not covering up while feeding my four-month-old," Jones-Hughes wrote in
The Guardian, "I decided it was time to make a statement to show that mothers will no longer tolerate being harassed for feeding our babies in public."
Lucky for her, it was a decent turn-out. There, amid the Christmas shoppers, 40 moms breastfed their babies openly. It isn't the first protest in the UK, where women in both London and Manchester staged mobs as part of National Breastfeeding Awareness week this past June.
Similar protests have taken place in the US, where mothers have also been targeted and told to stop nursing in public. Incredibly, there are still several states in which breastfeeding isn't exempt from public indecency laws.
On one hand, society is very pro-breastfeeding in principle, but in practice it is a different story. Sure, you can breastfeed, the conflicting message seems to be, just don't dare let anyone see you do it. There is no good place to nurse outside of the confines of your own home.
As many as 65% of moms in the UK were too self-conscious to even try breastfeeding in public, according to a
2009 poll by Mother & Baby magazine. In the US, in a survey at TheBump.com, that figure was even lower, at 41%.
Do you breastfeed in public? Have you ever been 'harassed' for it?
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