LONDON – Should new moms be allowed to breast-feed in public? Should they be made to cover up? Sit in a corner?
These are questions being hotly debated here after an incident at Claridge’s, one of the London’s poshest hotels. Earlier this month, new mom Louise Burns sat down for tea with her mom and sister at Claridge’s for an annual, pre-Christmas get-together. Moments after Burns started breast-feeding her 3-month-old daughter, she was approached by a waiter carrying a large napkin and politely asked to cover up.
“I felt that I was doing something that was right and natural and the best thing for my baby,” she told the BBC. In an emailed statement, the hotel said: “Of course Claridge’s allows breast-feeding. We just ask our guests to be discreet.”
Debates about breast-feeding in public are not limited to the U.K., of course. Similar tussles have bubbled up on a local level in the U.S., and breast-feeding in general prompts controversy of all kinds – Washington Post reporter Emily Wax-Thibodeaux recently highlighted how, even after a double mastectomy, she faced judgement for not being able to breast-feed.
But the debate ratcheted up a notch Friday, when U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage told a London radio station that some people feel “very embarrassed” by breast-feeding and suggested that nursing mothers could “perhaps sit in a corner.”
“I think that given that some people feel very embarrassed by it, it isn’t too difficult to breast-feed a baby in a way that’s not openly ostentatious,” he said.
The Twitterverse lit up. Farage’s political rivals were having a field day, while others wondered what “ostentatious” breast-feeding might look like.
Farage is not the only high-profile British politician to raise his views on breast-feeding. Last week, Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy prime minister, told the same London radio program that “We should create an environment where moms feel it is OK to breastfeed.” When asked about the rights of old men in a cafe sitting near a breast-feeding mother, Clegg said that moms listening to the program would be “spluttering with indignation at the implication that it is somehow, that it’s a kind of in-your-face thing to do in public.”
The issue has clearly hit a nerve, with nearly 100 mothers set to hold a “nurse-in” at Claridge’s, according to the “Free To Feed” Facebook page.
