by Amy Stone
Keep Your Breasts Behind Locked Doors!
Exterior of Mamava freestanding pod for “privacy for pumping or breastfeeding.” It locks from inside, with a space larger than an airplane lavatory. Photo credit: Amy Stone.
En route from the illy coffee concession to the Virgin America boarding gates at Newark Airport, I spied the pod. With my cascading fears of a new administration’s erosion of women’s freedoms, I felt alarm. Will women feel pressured into never breastfeeding their babies publicly? Are breasts only for grabbing in public by men newly freed from restraint by a power-tripping president-to-be?
My bias in favor of female visibility and freedom is obvious. But I am not beyond fine-tuning. What about women from traditional backgrounds—Orthodox Jewish women, traditional Muslim women—might they welcome a privacy pod? Maybe I should slow down my rush to judgment, be a bit more sisterly.Then this nailed it. I asked a breastfeeding friend whether she’d welcome a pod. “YES!” came the response. As she breastfed baby Theo in the privacy of her living room, she explained that by the time he reached six months it was impossible to breastfeed him in public. He was just too distracted by everything going on around him. Yes, she and Theo would definitely use a pod.
The interior of the mamava pod—all white except for cloud mural on one wall. Photo credit: Amy Stone.
As for her one Jewish experience—attempting to breastfeed in a synagogue— when she began breastfeeding in the back row, a man immediately told her to get out and go into the hall. The bare hall didn’t even have a chair, let alone a privacy pod for the nursing mother and her babe.
So much for Our People’s family values.
Amy Stone is a founding mother of Lilith, now a contributing editor and an ongoing Lilith blogger.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lilith Magazine.
For another article discussing breast feeding and religion, you can see the New York Times coverage of Pope Francis supporting public breast feeding here.