IBFAN AFRICA

The gift of life is the most precious thing a mother can impart to her child; breastfeeding is arguably the second. Baby formula can neither adequately replace the health benefits that breast milk provides nor does it replace the kind of early intimate relationship between a mother and a child that breastfeeding fosters.
Breastfeeding is not only free, but it also helps to boost the new infant’s immune system, making the child less susceptible to various ailments such as ear infections, asthma, allergies, cardiovascular diseases, nutrient deficiencies, obesity, etc. It also helps the mother to more easily lose the weight gained during pregnancy. It is therefore a little surprising that so many women are still deciding not to breastfeed as they put their child at a great disadvantage.  More surprising still is the attitude that many societies have towards breastfeeding.

Upon seeing a new mother nursing in public, nearly everyone around her will likely share the same reaction: they would probably be disgusted because a woman, unashamedly, has her breast partially exposed in public. The infant no longer exists because all the passersby see is a breast. “She cannot expose her breast in public!” they might say. “She should only have it out at home or atleast under sheet or in the bathroom if she absolutely has to do it in public.” As a result, women in some countries are relegated to breastfeeding behind closed doors or forced into an unsanitary environment, such as a bathroom, while in a public environment. Therein lies the problem. Yes, the breast may be a sexual object in certain contexts, but for the infant, it is a part of a necessary biological function: it is a life-giving vessel, a vessel that many of us may have spent a fair amount of our own infancies suckling on.

This near unwillingness to see the breast as anything apart from a sexual object is a key example of the over-sexualization of women that has become so common across the globe.  A woman’s breast is treated similarly to a forcefully veiled woman. Though a somewhat extreme parallel, the likening of a woman veiled from head to toe and a woman who is unable to breastfeed in public; the demand for women to cover themselves while breastfeeding is a prime example of the gender inequality and disparity that exist around the world, and inequality against which women have been fighting for decades.

A woman should be able to breastfeed whenever she needs to whether she is at a bus stop, in her cubicle, or at home: she must and has the right to simply fulfill her obligations as a mother regardless of her present location. In protest of society’s strict and, frankly, narrow definition of decency; breastfeeding may be another form of female empowerment. This show of defiance is nothing less than a woman asserting the right to her body as well as her child’s right to life. And, what is more empowering to a mother than the assurance that she is doing everything within her ability to provide the best quality of life to her child?
Zoe Samudzi
IBFAN Africa
Intern