Food or lewd? Breast-feeding reveals divide

Lewd in Las Vegas?
A confrontation last year in Las Vegas made Holt feel that way.

While on vacation, Holt was nursing her 22-month-old son at a hotel restaurant when the assistant manager started unfolding a napkin and motioning for her to cover up. When Holt said she was fine, thank you, two more restaurant employees got in on the conversation. They told her if she didn’t cover, she would have to leave. They began “explaining to me that I could not be naked in public, that there were nudity and lewdness laws in Las Vegas — could have fooled me!”

Being called lewd in Las Vegas — a city that practically invented the G-string — really rankled her. Holt wrote a letter of complaint to the hotel, which refunded the money she spent on her hotel stay, and promised to include information on Nevada breast-feeding laws in employee-training materials.

Nevada law says a mother may breast-feed her child in any public or private location where she is otherwise authorized to be, regardless of whether “the nipple of the mother’s breast is uncovered during or incidental to the breast-feeding.”

What's legal? As of November 2006, nearly all states had enacted some type of breast-feeding legislation. — Thirty-six states have laws that allow women to breast-feed in any public or private location. They are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah, Tennessee, Texas and Vermont. — Twenty states exempt breast-feeding from public indecency laws: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. More details on each state’s laws can be found at www.ncsl.org.

Why are we so uncomfortable?
Peters says part of our problem with nursing in public is that modern society has “lost that art of breast-feeding. We don’t know what normal physiology is.”

She heard a story from a Nigerian nurse-midwife, a new immigrant to the United States, that gave her pause. “She was astounded because she had a patient here who had never seen a woman breast-feed,” Peters says. “In Nigeria, everybody sees it. Young girls help young mothers as they’re going through childhood. They see what normal is. We don’t here.”

Part of that may be due to the popularity of infant formula, particularly in past generations. It was first developed in the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that it was embraced as the modern, hygienic way to feed babies. Because early infant formula was so expensive, it gained popularity first among the upper classes.

“Now the resurgence of breast-feeding is following the same pattern,” Peters says. Many studies say that low-income, less educated women have lower breast-feeding rates than wealthier women.

Falling short of the goal
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies be exclusively breast-fed (with no added water, juice or other foods) for the first six months of life. It supports breast-feeding for the first year and beyond as long as mother and child are willing. But in 2005, only 21 states achieved the national Healthy People goal for 75 percent of mothers to begin breast-feeding at birth, according to CDC data.

The goal is for at least half of all mothers to still be breast-feeding at 6 months, and 25 percent at the 1-year mark. But only five states — California, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont and Washington — achieved all three benchmarks in 2005.

While most who criticize moms nursing in public say they object to overexposure, some unique arguments have been raised over the years.

Six years ago, Waldherr took her kids to family swim night at the public pool in Fife, Wash. She wanted to keep an eye on her toddler in the water, so she sat by the side of the pool to nurse her infant. A lifeguard said she had to move away from the water so that she wouldn’t leak “bodily fluids” into the pool. And the lifeguard cited leaky breasts as the reason for banning her from the pool for the remainder of the night.

Waldherr, shaking with anger, grabbed her kids and her husband and left. Lifeguards and city officials later apologized. But Waldherr sued the city. She reached an out-of-court settlement. Her case was reported by newspapers and television.

“If that’s going to be my legacy, I hope it’s positive,” Waldherr, who’s now expecting her third child, says. “I have a really hard time figuring out what the big whoop about it is. People have been doing it for a jillion years.”

Debbie Cafazzo is a writer based in Tacoma, Wash.

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