Moms Speak Up is collaborative blog of writers from various backgrounds. We're talking about the environment, dangerous imports, health care, food safety, media and marketing, education, politics and many other hot topics of concern.
About Us
We are women, parents, consumers, voters and much, much more and we're fed up with the "business as usual" attitude of politicians & greedy corporations. It's time for us to speak up and be heard!
A while back we talked on about how well it works - or doesn’t work - to bring your baby to work as a way to bridge the need to work with the urge and need to be with and feed your baby. So we were pretty excited to learn about the Babies in the Workplace program, run by Carla Moquin of the Parenting in the Workplace Institute. How great is it that these resources are cropping up? Carla’s goal is to better integrate children into the workplace. In her own words:
For most of human history, mothers kept their babies with them while they worked to support their families. However, after the Industrial Revolution, having children in a work environment was no longer feasible. Society became fragmented - children separated from their parents, and parents often separated from society. It’s time for a change!
If you want to start a program at your employer, there’s a how-to guide for purchase or you can contact the founder, Carla Moquin @ (801) 897-8702. Happy baby working!
My friends and I decided to take the kids and go out to lunch today. I had just given my friend Cynthia a thank you note and gift card to Starbucks.
“Thank you for the gift card!” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, “I nearly got you something practical, but I know you drive past Starbucks every day so this way you can treat yourself a little.”
“ARGH!” I yelled, right in the middle of the restaurant, “I am so offended!”
But I’m not offended by Starbucks; I’m offended that some group thinks that breasts are so obscene that the group members, and everyone else for that matter, should boycott a coffeehouse because it shows a little curve of a breast on an illustration of a mermaid.
Breast. Breast. Breast. Breast. Breast. A mammary gland that sits on every woman’s chest at some point, at least. Prone to cancer. Useful for supporting bodices. Intended to nurse our young. A body part.
I got this in my mailbox this morning. Read the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, read Kristen Kelly’s story, then go and sign the petition to get it going.
Really, I find it disheartening that this Act is even being considered on the table. If people could just accept that breastfeeding is just a natural occurrence, and get over their own issues, this act would not even be necessary. But, it is, because we live in a sort of world that makes it necessary. Too harsh?
Dear MomsRising Member,
Just a couple of months ago, a mother was kicked out of a museum in New York for breastfeeding, a perfectly legal act in that state. [1] Mothers continue to suffer discrimination and humiliation for breastfeeding, even though doctors recommend breastfeeding for all infants. Clearly we need Congress to pass the Breastfeeding Promotion Act (H.R. 3799) now–before more mothers are stigmatized and humiliated for breastfeeding.
But this Act is currently stalled in Congress, and isn’t going to move forward without increased citizen pressure. You can supply that pressure.
CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSON NOW: http://www.momsrising.org/CosponsorBreastfeedingAct
MomsRising members have successfully raised awareness about the need to protect the rights of breastfeeding mothers in the past and can do it again. Last year, MomsRising members and other activists changed Delta Airlines’ corporate policies when a mother was kicked off a flight for breastfeeding.
We can harness this same power to push through the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, but we need your help contacting Congress. Let’s support mothers who are nurturing and caring for the next generation of Americans. Those nursing babies may not be able to vote, but their mothers can!
P.S. THE LOWDOWN ON THE BREASTFEEDING PROMOTION ACT: Representative Carolyn Maloney’s Breastfeeding Promotion Act (H.R. 3799) would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect breastfeeding by new mothers by providing tax credits to employers who provide a place to breastfeed and/or provide breast pumps. This makes it a lot easier for women who want to give their babies breastmilk and keep their jobs. As you may know, 82% of American women become mothers by the time they are forty-four years old, so this issue is critically important to a large portion of our nation. To read the bill, visit The Library of Congress Website.
This YouTube video is just a portion of this awesome film. It’s actually Chapter 5. But believe me, chapters 1-4 are also totally worth watching and if you go here, you can watch the whole thing from start to finish.
It’s about twenty minutes but it will be some of the most illuminating, eye-opening minutes you’ve ever spent watching any indie documentary. Show it to your kids and send the link to friends and family. Everyone in America should watch this film.
YouTube claims these photos of mothers who are rather discretely feeding their children violate the Terms of Use of their sites because such photos are inappropriate and sexually explicit.
If these videos of supermodels prancing around in next to nothing and home movies of girlfriends shaking their boo-TAYS are permissible and not sexually explicit in the eyes of these social networks, then why are breastfeeding photos? In both cases, the same amount of breast flesh is exposed. And breastfeeding a baby is not meant to arouse the men-folk while, I dare say, the other examples are.
And that’s really the issue here, isn’t it? It’s not really about inappropriateness, but about how women are viewed by men. Otherwise, as I might have argued before a judge in my previous life, don’t we have a distinction without a difference here?
This is just one of the more obvious ways that illustrates our society’s inherent lack of respect for women.
One type of video is meant for men’s amusement and pleasure and the other isn’t. When I was researching a story for Breast Cancer Awareness month, I asked one person I interviewed why so many companies are interested in jumping on the breast cancer awareness bandwagon and not other diseases that impact women as much, if not more?
Her answer? Sadly, that breast cancer has more sex appeal than heart disease.
This battle with Facebook and YouTube is really just a symptom of the larger lack of respect problem — the absence of real workplace policies that support women after they’ve had babies, the willingness of our schools to expect working mothers to take their time to work on projects for the kids but not working fathers, the presence of only one woman justice on the Supreme Court, and the rulings written by male justices that show that we really have not come very far in ridding ourselves of paternalistic views toward women.
While it’s impossible to tackle all the issues women and working mothers face at any given moment, there is something we can do now to promote the cause today as it relates to policies that protect breastfeeding mothers.
The League of Maternal Justice has provided a series of tips about what we can do right now to start to make change. Take a trip over there to check them out. Our voices are loud and strong when we’re getting the kids to do their chores, so why not use them to take this first step toward gaining the respect we deserve?
I won’t put up with disrespect from a second-grader. I’m certainly not to going stand for it from a bunch of men who’d have contests and awards for themselves if they were the ones in charge of the breastfeeding.
I recently wrote about how immigration officials, in their suddenly zealous rounding up of illegal immigrants, detained a breastfeeding mother, effectively forcing her to abruptly stop nursing.
And well, it’s happened again, this time in Ohio, where a breastfeeding mother was taken away as she was breastfeeding. From the news article:
The baby wailed as mom and dad were led away. And she cried incessantly over the next several days as she went without breast milk while mom was in jail, sick with worry.
“For three days, I knew nothing of my children,” Umanzor said Thursday, speaking through an interrupter. “It was like a piece of me was torn away.”
The denial of mother’s milk to the child of an illegal immigrant has outraged local immigration advocates, Latino civic leaders, and moms. They say a baby went hungry and a mother suffered engorged breasts and emotional trauma while being detained for nearly two weeks for a non-violent offense.
I must reiterate that while I understand the basic premise that a person who is in this country illegally must face the consequences of their actions, this is abusive. These raids are based less on their being “illegal” and more on paranoia. There have already been cases where legal residents, who happen to be Hispanic or “foreign-looking”, have been detained, only to be released after experiencing much fear and and stress, without so much as an apology.
As these raids become more frequent and widespread, more and more children - children who are in most cases U.S. citizens and therefore entitled to basic rights their parents are denied - are ending up suddenly alone and scared. And ICE officials wipe their hands of the matter as they lead parents away.
How is this acceptable? How is this justified? The fact that the people in question reside here illegally does not, in my opinion, mean that they should be treated without dignity and respect, especially when you consider that the grand majority of them contribute to our society by doing the work none of us want to do and paying taxes, and have no criminal records.
And in specific cases like this, what of breastfeeding mothers? Can’t they be left on supervised released, like so many illegal immigrants are, so she can be with her child and family as her case moves through the system? Can’t the detention be held off until a reasonable arrangement is made?
Bottom line for me: this is wrong, and it has to change. The government cannot continue to carry these raids out in this manner; and more importantly, without any accountability.
I’ve got an odd coupling here for you all, but I wanted to provide some follow-up to two of my posts. On the heels of the Mexican parents who were detained and deported without a chance to contact their 11-year-old son, we recently had a Haitian mother who was detained and forced to stop breastfeeding her 5-month-old daughter.
On October 15, Francieuse Lafortune’s appeal to stay in the U.S. was denied, and she was immediately detained, a move that in effect forced her to abruptly stop breastfeeding her baby. For those of you who have breastfed or who are in the medical community, you know how traumatic such an abrupt separation can be. And in reality, it was not even necessary, since it is not unusual to grant supervised release to someone who has been given a deportation order.
The good news is that Lafortune has been released (under supervised release, which, duh, they should have done from the beginning!) and reunited with her daughter and husband. You can read the short news report here.
Next, I had told you guys about Publix Super Market’s fabulous “green” bags. Guess who has a similar bag now? JC Penney! I know! I was shopping there the other day (don’t judge! They have some great stuff now, plus a decent petites selection), and they kept making announcements over the loudspeaker about their new environmentally-friendly, reusable shopping bags. So when I got up to the counter to pay, I asked about it, and for $1.49 (seems to be a popular price) I got a large, beige shopper made of the same material as the Publix ones. It’s pretty neat! Incredibly roomy, with large handles. I could easily take this one bag to the mall and need nothing else (and if I do, at $1.49 a pop, they’re a steal). So, kudos JC Penney!
So it seems that while Facebook spends all its time seeking out and deleting pictures of women breastfeeding, they’re letting far more dangerous activities go unnoticed.
David Wescott already posted about the high number of pro-anorexia groups available on Facebook, and today the New York State Attorney General announced they were investigating Facebook for not better protecting its younger users from sexual predators.
Investigators went undercover, posing as underage members on the social networking site, and found no shortage of porn and adults seeking sex with minors.
Facebook, where are your priorities? You spend all of your energy chasing after breastfeeding moms, yet you let sexual predators run wild on your site. You quibble over the definition of obscene when it comes to an infant sucking on a breast, but hard-core porn can be found with little trouble.
Which is more dangerous: a mom sharing photos of breastfeeding with other moms, or an adult contacting minors to solicit sex? Somehow I think Facebook has a different answer than mine, and that is scary.
You may recall several months back that MySpace kept removing a photo of a breastfeeding baby from a member’s page (because it violated their obscenity rules) and threatened to remove her from MySpace altogether if she continued re-posting said photo. (You can see one of the “obscene†photos here.)
Now Facebook is doing the same thing. Most people (sane ones) would agree that it’s absolutely ludicrous to deem breastfeeding an obscene act, right? Right.
So glad we’re all on the same page.
But the kicker, one that takes my breath away, is that Facebook hosts, with no repercussions whatsoever, over 350 pro-anorexia groups. Yes. 350.
Blogger David Wescott makes an excellent point in his post on this issue:
Facebook has come down on both sides of a “free speech issue†here - once clamping down, once letting speech and organizing go - and in each case it’s come down in a way that arguably sets women back.
Apparently there have been some pretty monumental protests on Facebook over the “breastfeeding is obscene†issue. I’m not sure about the pro-anorexia groups. Either way, if you’re a breastfeeding mom or the parent of a child/children of either gender (boys get anorexia, too) these topics affect you.
I’m asking for all of you (You DON’T have to be a mom OR a parent OR a woman) to take action by writing a post on one or both of these topics. The links above reference more information on both topics. After you’ve written your post, let me know so I can link you here and over at my personal blog, IzzyMom, where I have cross-posted this.
Oh, and here is a most awesome post that drives home a point myself and others have made over and over about the whole “boobs for breastfeeding = bad! ~ boobs to sell stuff = good!†backwardassed way of thinking in the US. If this doesn’t get you fired up, nothing will.
(Thanks to David Wescott for bringing this stuff to my attention. I’ve been a bit out of the loop the past week or two with a gravely ill family member so I wasn’t aware of these latest slaps in the face to mothers and females worldwide)
Edited to Add II: David Westcott contacted Facebook about all this anti-breastfeeding and pro-ana crap. Want to know how they responded to his questions about their policies? Read it here but be prepared to get supremely irritated.
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