Earth Babies Blog

Follow this link – Breastfeeding is offensive – I love this post it is so true and for me hard hitting in its amusing simplicity. Good for a giggle but also to get you thinking.

If you are on Facebook why not join in the MILC virtual nurse-in next week. My issue is not so much that Facebook feels that nursing pictures are inappopriate (though I cannot see why), but more so the double standard of allowing truely sexual profile pics yet deleting those as innocent as breastfeeding.

The Mother’s International Lactation Campaign (M.I.L.C.) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the normalisation, protection and promotion of breastfeeding.

In 2008 and 2009 via the Facebook group “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is not Obscene!(official Petition to Facebook)” The organisation hosted two nurse-in events on the popular social networking site. Facebook continues to remove depictions of breastfeeding from their site, demeaning women and encouraging the misconception that breastfeeding is in any way a lewd, sexually explicit or offensive act and is inappropriate content for their site. Facebook has issued several public statements in response to the petition group, claiming to support breastfeeding but removing some images out of “concern for the safety of the many young users of the site.”

The virtual nurse-ins received extensive media coverage all around the world and membership in the petition group has surpased 240 000. On one designated day, participants simply posted as their profile picture the image of a nursing mother and changed their status line to: Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene. Individuals used a very diverse and representative range
of images for the event including personal photographs, historic works of art and international symbols.

August 1-7, 2009 is World Breastfeeding Week.

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