We're due for a breast feeding discussion

[MrsSpringsteen]

Salma Hayek On Why She Breastfed Another Woman's Baby

Actress Travels to Africa on 'Complicated but Very Doable' Project to Fight Tetanus

By KIMBERLY KAPLAN

Feb. 11, 2009—

Since ABC's "Nightline" aired a story last week about Salma Hayek's goodwill trip to Sierra Leone, there has been a world-wide outpouring of reaction. Newspapers from Europe to Australia have made headlines out of a portion of the story in which Hayek breastfeeds another woman's newborn son on camera.

The clip of Hayek nursing a very hungry baby boy (ironically born on the same day as her own daughter) has surfaced on YouTube as well as on dozens of other web sites, drawing thousands of comments.

The actress and producer was told by doctors in Sierra Leone that many mothers stop breastfeeding their infants within the first few months after birth because of pressure from their husbands. Tradition has it, in some areas, that it is not acceptable to have sexual relations with breast feeding women.

Sierra Leone has the highest infant mortality rate in the world, in part fueled by malnutrition. Physicians there told Hayek they would like to see mothers breastfeed for a full two years but that stigma too often gets in the way.

Salma Hayek on Breastfeeding

Hayek said her decision to breastfeed another woman's child was an attempt to diminish the stigma placed on women for breast feeding. At the time she was still breastfeeding her 1-year-old daughter.

She told "Nightline" co-anchor Cynthia McFadden that she thought her daughter wouldn't mind sharing her milk. "Am I being disloyal to my child by giving her milk away?" Hayek said. "I actually think my baby would be very proud to share her milk. And when she grows up I'm going to make sure she continues to be a generous, caring person."

Hayek told McFadden that that the idea of helping a child in this way had a long tradition in her family. She related a story about her great-grandmother many years ago in Mexico saving the starving baby of a stranger by breastfeeding the child.

What Others Are Saying

A blogger on EW.com, the web site for Entertainment Weekly, declared the video clip winner of the "biggest eyebrow-raiser award" and called Hayek cool "because her left breast has now done more for humanity in a few minutes than I've done in roughly my life."

People commenting on mom and parenting web sites also had kudos for Hayek. "I got warm fuzzies when I saw this video," wrote Ribbiee78 on iVillage.com. "Awesome, just awesome. Even that little bit will help this baby boy."

Jennifer Perillo, who is the food editor at Working Mother magazine and writes blogs for NYC Moms Blog, The Mama Chronicles and The Daily Juggle, called Hayek's act "one of the greatest gifts you can give...a piece of yourself." Perillo is currently nursing her nine-month old baby.

She's also happy to see the attention shifted away from the octuplets mom. "Here's one person using her body to feed whatever emotional issues she has," Perillo said about Nadya Suleman, who added eight babies to the six she already had. "The flip side is a woman whose body is producing something naturally who is actually using it in such a powerful and positive way."

Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, the OB-GYN expert on momlogic.com, finds the whole thing an ironic twist on America's history of breastfeeding, which includes black wet nurses forced to breastfeed the slave owners' children during slavery and Victorian-era women who paid other women to nurse their children so they didn't have to be stuck at home.

"God bless Salma Hayek, who can go stick her boob in some poor African baby's mouth," Dr. Gilberg-Lenz said. "I think it's completely crazy. But I say, 'You go." slant: -that's a doctor?) She made a point and she made it loud and clear. And look, it's started a conversation about how breastfeeding is good and women should have a choice about it and we shouldn't be so afraid of our bodies."

YouTube - Video of Salma Hayek Breast Feeding

 

[AliEnvy]

"...an ironic twist on America's history of breastfeeding, which includes black wet nurses forced to breastfeed the slave owners' children during slavery and Victorian-era women who paid other women to nurse their children so they didn't have to be stuck at home."

We are SO twisted.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

time.com

Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009
Salma Hayek, Breastfeeding and One Very Public Service
By Ada Calhoun

If anyone on the planet can convince men that breastfeeding moms can have a sex life, it would be Salma Hayek. The beautifully busty actress, on a trip to Sierra Leone to support a tetanus vaccination project, nursed a starving baby she encountered while being filmed by ABC News. She did this, she told the camera crew, in part out of compassion for a suffering child, but also to help lift the stigma against breastfeeding in Africa, where men often think women can't have sex if they're still nursing. "So the husbands, of course, of these women are really encouraging them to stop," Hayek said.

But if breastfeeding is taboo in Africa, cross-nursing — in which one woman occasionally suckles another's baby — is taboo in America. While crunchy sites like Mothering.com have exploded with hundreds of giddy posts praising Hayek for promoting the cause of breastfeeding, plenty of online reactions were more squeamish. EW.com gave the YouTube clip its "biggest eyebrow-raiser" of the day award.

Although donating breast milk is becoming more mainstream — Nadya Suleman's octuplets have been consuming donated milk — cross-nursing still conjures up the specter of wet-nursing, with all its class issues and antiquated notions about women's bodies yoked in service to others. The official word on cross-nursing, too, is still nix. It seems that no institution, even those that support milk sharing, is willing to endorse women who share their milk without a breast pump serving as intermediary. The Human Milk Banking Association of North America, which screens and distributes donated milk to hospitals across the U.S. and Canada, insists banked milk be pasteurized before being distributed.

"Babies benefit from human milk donated by other mothers when their own mother's milk is unavailable," La Leche League says in its cross-nursing and wet-nursing statement. But, the statement continues, one of the group's breastfeeding advocates "shall not ever suggest an informal milk-donation arrangement, including wet-nursing or cross-nursing."

La Leche's concerns include the possibility of transmitting infections, a decrease in supply for the donor's own baby, psychological confusion on the part of the infant, and the fact that the composition of breast milk changes as children get older.

But assuming Hayek wasn't at risk of contracting anything from the baby — who Hayek reported was healthy but whose mother simply had no milk — none of these caveats seem relevant. Hayek's emergency nursing more closely resembles Chinese policewoman Jiang Xiaojuan's heroic breastfeeding of several babies orphaned by the May earthquake, and few would argue she was anything but a lifesaver.

Sure, it's only one feeding, and that baby — who was born the same day as Hayek's daughter — will need a lot more milk to see him safely out of infancy. But perhaps Hayek's gesture will indeed make a difference to the breastfeeding cause in Africa. And if nothing else, the world's cross-nursers — long equated with wet nurses and made to feel shame for their hippie ways — suddenly have the most glamorous spokeswoman they could ever have imagined.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Talk about multitasking..

Seriously though, that's insane


Dayton Daily News

KETTERING — A Harrison Twp. woman faces child endangering charges after police said she admitted to breastfeeding her child and talking on a cell phone while driving, according to Kettering Police Officer Michael Burke.

The incident happened about 7:45 a.m. Thursday, Feb., 26, near the intersection of Far Hills Avenue and Dorothy Lane, Burke said.

A male motorist called the police department's non-emergency number to report that he had seen the woman breastfeeding and talking on a cell phone while driving, Burke said. The man reported that he also witnessed the woman driving a Honda minivan into the parking lot of a local school and saw some children get out of the van. The man then got the van's license plate number and called police.

"I'm following right behind her right now on Far Hills Avenue," the caller said as he spoke to a Kettering dispatcher in a recording of his non-emergency call that was released by police on Friday, Feb. 27.

"I tried to say something to her. She literally has the little girl on the steering wheel and I said, 'I can't believe you have that kid in your lap and she said, 'You want to pop your titty out and breastfeed this kid?' That's what she said to me. I'm like, 'You can feed your kid when you stop.' It's like wet out here. It's full of traffic. It's ridiculous. She's got like three other kids in the car."

The police came to the area and tried to locate the van, but could not find it. So they used the license plate number to track down her contact information, Burke said.

When a police officer spoke to her, she admitted she breastfed her child and also told police that she does not deprive her child when the child is hungry, Burke said.

The officer took the information and presented it to the city prosecutor's office. That's when Genine Compton, 39, of Elm Grove in Harrison Twp., was charged with a first-degree misdemeanor of child endangering and minor misdemeanor for unlawfully restraining her child, which Burke believes was under 2.

When police were unsuccessful with serving Compton her ticket and a court summons at her home on Friday, Feb. 27, an officer went to the school where the witness saw her drop off the children on Thursday morning. The officer used the descriptions the witness gave to locate Compton at the school and serve the tickets and summons, Burke said. Compton was not arrested.

When asked why the tickets and summons couldn't be mailed, Burke said, "It's legal documents. We have to personally serve them to the defendant."

If convicted of the child endangering charge, Compton could face up to 180 days in jail and fined between $1,500 and $1,800, Burke said. If convicted of the unlawful restraint charge, Compton could be fined up to $150.

"Our issue is not the fact that this woman was breastfeeding in public," Burke said. He added that Compton would have been charged even if the child was just sitting on her lap. "Our issue is that she created the condition that placed her child's health and safety at risk."

 

[MooMoo!]

o__O

Oh COME ON, if she at least pulled up hard the kid could well be dead! WTF is going though your head woman!?

Its illegal where I live to drive and talk on a phone, so thats bad enough as it is.

 

[Bonoa]

Okay now, explain to me, a lot of men men want to see tits, tits, and more tits. They are on TV, in magazines, the beach and on Spring Break. If it's not enough, then the man moves into a titty bar with his friends, in order to be stared at for a couple of hours by these dancing nippies where he even spends a whole lot of money!
But when a woman is breastfeeding her child in public, the same men go NUTS! Why?

What do you think your mothers did when you were hungry in your earliest days?

 

[deep]

personally I think America should evolve to the more rational European attitude about the human body.
Violence and mayhem should be the obscenities.

 

[Dirty Olde Town]

American puritans strike again.

I mean, really, why do we care so much? Hayek fed a baby with her breast. If she felt like that single feeding wasn't going to be detrimental to her own child, then, well... go for it!
As for putting a towel/blanket over the kid's face...

Yeah, I can see how it'd be a little disconcerting to the baby, seeing how much they fuss any other time they have a blanket over their faces. And yes, people DO do this, at least in Chicago. I've seen this in the middle of summer, the poor kid wrapped like a mummy and sweltering in the heat. People don't seem to realize that the kid is squirming out of the blanket because he's /hot/!

 

[DreamOutLoud13]

Good on Salma. If I were lactating, I'd do the exact same thing in that situation.

I hate how people think it's SO ICKY to share breast milk. Um. Look in your fridge. See that carton of milk? It came from a cow. A cow who was genetically modified to produce milk even when it doesn't have a calf. I'm not making an animal rights point, I'm just saying, if you think about it, it's a lot grosser than simply feeding your baby milk from another human mother.

And human breast milk is the ABSOLUTELY BEST thing for babies. Way better than artificial infant formula.

The whole stigma against breastfeeding, in this country especially, is absolutely ridiculous. For many many years, it went completely out of fashion in this country and became something of a taboo. Wealthier mothers hired wetnurses, and then mass-produced baby formula came onto the market, and then hardly anyone nursed. It didn't start being widely done again until the 60s/70s. I was born in 1985, but I've heard the story many times about how appalled my grandmother was when my mother decided to breastfeed me. She kept urging my mother not to do it, because to her generation it was not considered a natural and healthy thing to do, but thought of as disgusting.

 

[DreamOutLoud13]

American puritans strike again.

I mean, really, why do we care so much? Hayek fed a baby with her breast. If she felt like that single feeding wasn't going to be detrimental to her own child, then, well... go for it!
As for putting a towel/blanket over the kid's face...

Yeah, I can see how it'd be a little disconcerting to the baby, seeing how much they fuss any other time they have a blanket over their faces. And yes, people DO do this, at least in Chicago. I've seen this in the middle of summer, the poor kid wrapped like a mummy and sweltering in the heat. People don't seem to realize that the kid is squirming out of the blanket because he's /hot/!

Go back a page or two and look at the photos I posted of nursing wear. No one needs to cover the child with a blanket if they simply invest in a nursing top.

 

[Jive Turkey]

Okay now, explain to me, a lot of men men want to see tits, tits, and more tits. They are on TV, in magazines, the beach and on Spring Break. If it's not enough, then the man moves into a titty bar with his friends, in order to be stared at for a couple of hours by these dancing nippies where he even spends a whole lot of money!
But when a woman is breastfeeding her child in public, the same men go NUTS! Why?

What do you think your mothers did when you were hungry in your earliest days?

Lets assume that some women also want to see dick, dick and more dick. Does that mean I should be able to whip mine out in public and piss into a plastic jug? Why should I be forced to take time out of my busy schedule to find a pubic washroom? They're often filthy and can be a risk to my health. Plus, peeing is natural.....some might even say beautiful (or maybe not)

 

[MooMoo!]

Lets assume that some women also want to see dick, dick and more dick. Does that mean I should be able to whip mine out in public and piss into a plastic jug? Why should I be forced to take time out of my busy schedule to find a pubic washroom? They're often filthy and can be a risk to my health. Plus, peeing is natural.....some might even say beautiful (or maybe not)

That made me giggle for the wrong reasons. Or the right reasons. I dunno. It made me giggle either way.

 

[pgv]

Lets assume that some women also want to see dick, dick and more dick. Does that mean I should be able to whip mine out in public and piss into a plastic jug? Why should I be forced to take time out of my busy schedule to find a pubic washroom? They're often filthy and can be a risk to my health. Plus, peeing is natural.....some might even say beautiful (or maybe not)

That you equate urination to breast feeding is pretty, hilariously inaccurate.

 

[Jive Turkey]

That you equate urination to breast feeding is pretty, hilariously inaccurate.

Please explain. I realize that my post was quite ridiculous (it was meant to be), but I think it illustrates a point. I'm using a sexual organ in a non sexual way and its 100% natural. Why should that be different?

 

[deep]

urination soon follows breastfeeding.

and taking in nourishment and the elimination of waste from said nourishment are necessary for existence

 

[pgv]

Please explain. I realize that my post was quite ridiculous (it was meant to be), but I think it illustrates a point. I'm using a sexual organ in a non sexual way and its 100% natural. Why should that be different?

I know you were being sarcastic, but there was a point there that perhaps I picked up on when I shouldn't.
Breasts aren't sexual organs. They may have been sexualised to within an inch of their lives in recent years(/throughout history) but at the end of the day their function is to breast feed, not procreate or urinate. So to suggest that they're in any way 'dirty' would be wrong. Why they're such a taboo and we hide them away in public is because of these misconceptions, not because of the breast itself.

 

[A_Wanderer]

A function of signaling reproductive fitness is quite plausible, I would put human breasts into an evolutionary context, although the question demands further study.

 

[deep]

I know you were being sarcastic, but there was a point there that perhaps I picked up on when I shouldn't.
Breasts aren't sexual organs. .

some truth in what you say

breast do respond to sexual stimulation,

and if one wants to break it down
'parts' of what we call the sex organs and not required for procreation, therefore would one want to argue that they are not sexual?

 

[pgv]

some truth in what you say

breast to respond to sexual stimulation,

and if want to break it down 'parts' of what we call the sex organs and not required for procreation, therefore would one want to argue that they are not sexual?

Breasts respond to stimulation, not exclusively sexual.

If you're going to label a breast a sex organ, then you could pretty much describe anything as a sex organ.

You do not need breasts to get pregnant. That's basically my criteria.

 

[deep]

Do you need a clitoris to get pregnant?

 

[pgv]

There has been recent evidence to suggest it could help.

 

[Jive Turkey]

I know you were being sarcastic, but there was a point there that perhaps I picked up on when I shouldn't.
Breasts aren't sexual organs. They may have been sexualised to within an inch of their lives in recent years(/throughout history) but at the end of the day their function is to breast feed, not procreate or urinate. So to suggest that they're in any way 'dirty' would be wrong. Why they're such a taboo and we hide them away in public is because of these misconceptions, not because of the breast itself.

They may not be primary sexual organs, but to say they arent sexual isnt very accurate either. Its not like a bunch of men got tired of vaginas 150 years ago and got together to figure out a new part of the anatomy to lust over. Its in men's nature to be attracted to breast. The fact that human females are the only mammals to have visible breast when not lactating is proof of this. Its in our nature. we cant help it (I said I cant help it, Damn it!!!!). But lets say say for a second that they arent at all sexual. Either are buttholes (at least they shouldnt be in the hetro community IMO...gays? go nuts), but you cant go waving those around in public eiter. For the record, I'm not opposed to public breast feeding, I just think theres a time and place and it wouldnt hurt to try to cover up a little. Its called modesty

 

[deep]

There has been recent evidence to suggest it could help.

there are plenty of women conceiving and giving birth after having had that part of thier body removed to verify the argument that it is not required to get pregnant. (your criteria)

 

[pgv]

They may not be primary sexual organs, but to say they arent sexual isnt very accurate either. Its not like a bunch of men got tired of vaginas 150 years ago and got together to figure out a new part of the anatomy to lust over. Its in men's nature to be attracted to breast. The fact that human females are the only mammals to have visible breast when not lactating is proof of this. Its in our nature. we cant help it (I cant help it, Damn it!!!!). But lets say say for a second that they arent at all sexual. Either are buttholes (at least they shouldnt be in the hetro community IMO...gays? go nuts), but you cant go waving those around in public eiter. For the record, I'm not opposed to public breast feeding, I just think theres a time and place and it wouldnt hurt to try to cover up a little. Its called modesty

Just because something's some sort of institution doesn't justify it. No, breasts are not sexual, and no amount of 'but men find them sexual' will cause me to change my mind. Same goes with the breasts out in public issue. There's nothing wrong with it - it's entirely natural - and if anyone complains, it's their problem, not the woman's. If you think a woman is being immodest by breast feeding in public, then you have an interesting view on modesty.

 

[A_Wanderer]

How is sexual attraction not natural?

 

[pgv]

Sexual attraction/sexual in practise are two different things and the former depends on perspective.

Quite amazing how this becomes a male orientated issue, as usual.

 

[Jive Turkey]

If you think a woman is being immodest by breast feeding in public, then you have an interesting view on modesty.

You didnt read my post. I said I didnt have a problem with it. Why not just cover up a little though? Its really not a big deal.....And men finding breasts attractive isnt the juvenile pursuit that you seem to think of it as. Its got nothing to do with being an institution. Men all over the globe find women's breasts attractive in a sexual way. Like it or hate it, its part of nature

 

[Jive Turkey]

Quite amazing how this becomes a male orientated issue, as usual.

No, its not a male issue, its a people issue. But women are the only ones capable of breast feeding. Did you really think sex wouldnt come into the equation at any time????

 

[pgv]

You didnt read my post. I said I didnt have a problem with it. Why not just cover up a little though? Its really not a big deal.....And men finding breasts attractive isnt the juvenile pursuit that you seem to think of it as. Its got nothing to do with being an institution. Men all over the globe find women's breasts attractive in a sexual way. Like it or hate it, its part of nature

Cover up a little? How? Cower in a corner with an arm awkwardly shielding one's chest, awkwardly pull ones top up while trying to hold a baby too... I mean, by saying 'cover up a little' might as well mean 'don't do it in public.'
I don't think there's anything wrong with finding breasts attractive... but as soon as this attraction is preventing women from breast feeding comfortably, then it's an issue.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Sexual attraction/sexual in practise are two different things and the former depends on perspective.

Quite amazing how this becomes a male orientated issue, as usual.

I would agree that fetishising breast feeding, and making that an issue, along with topless sunbathing, is more a product of social forcing than anything innate.

And of course this is going to be a magnet for men, it's got breasts for goodness sake.