Moms Hold Nurse-In At 100+ Target Stores: Did Anyone Notice?
What would you do if your baby needed to nurse and you were in the middle of a department store? What if you were asked to leave? Would you turn around and organize a movement?
Michelle Hickman sat down in a secluded corner of the Webster, Texas Target and quietly nursed her baby with a cover. Two security guards approached her and told her to move to a fitting room and when she didn’t things got a little ugly. When Hickman called the company’s corporate headquarters, she was told that: “just because it’s a woman’s legal right to nurse a baby in public doesn’t mean she should walk around the store flaunting it.”
Target has gotten into trouble before with nursing moms, but Target isn’t the problem. The problem is that breastfeeding is still seen as something abnormal that should be done in private.
Many women all over North America are probably asked to cover up, to go the bathroom to feed their babies, to leave because they are being “indecent” – and they do. But Hickman went public and the news spread like wildfire across the Internet. Best for Babes and other breastfeeding advocacy groups sent out the message and on December 28th there was nurse-in at 100 Targets across the U.S.
Moms and babies went peacefully to Target stores and nursed their babies in big groups and small, they nursed in the front and in the aisles. In some places there were more media than mothers but they all came with the message that nursing in public is a woman’s and a baby’s right.
I find the opposition to public nursing completely ludicrous, especially in contrast to the myriad of sexy barely-clad women in ads littered all over the malls. Is a woman nursing with a cover really more obscene than most bra ads? A nursing mother is definitely showing less breast than a Victoria’s Secret angel but she is thrown out of a store.
I know I have to agree to disagree with many readers on this topic.
I wonder if I lived near Target store (which I’m happy to say I will in 2013 when they come across the border) and I was still nursing would I have gone to the nurse-in?
I probably would have. Would you?
How far would you go to stand up for nursing in public?
Want more chaos? Last year, I wrote about the great toy purge and why it was hard for me to let go of plastic.
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