| back |  home |

No right-thinking person would agree to eat their lunch in a public toilet. It is unreasonable, not to mention unhygienic, to expect the smallest members of our society to do so. Yet there are still bars, restaurants and shopping centres in Scotland where breastfeeding mothers are being ordered to button up and excuse themselves. Alternatively, they could go into purdah until their babies are weaned, another unreasonable expectation in a society where women are nearly as active outside the home as men.

There is a third way. It is to engineer a cultural shift to make breastfeeding in public not only acceptable but normal. Public opinion is moving in the right direction, but official encouragement and voluntary codes will never alter the attitudes of the hard core of backward-thinking publicans, managers and customers who continue to dispense the milk of human unkindness on this issue. That is why the passing of Elaine Smith's Breastfeeding (Scotland) Bill is to be welcomed.

Breastfeeding could be called Scotland's second battle of the bottle. The situation is improving but, outwith Ireland, Scotland has still the highest level of bottlefeeding in western Europe. There are several reasons for this. Ignorance enables old wives' tales to persist, especially among the most deprived: the mistaken belief that formula milk is similar or identical to breast milk; the fear that breastfeeding will change body shape for the worse, when the reality is that it helps new mothers shed excess weight; the erroneous assumption that it is a skill that comes naturally only to some people. Another factor is the sexualisation of breasts in modern British popular culture, a process fostered by top-shelf magazines and the tabloid press. Women breastfeeding in church was once a common sight in this country. A century ago in Britain, and in many other parts of Europe today, the idea of women putting their breasts to their original use is not even a source of embarrassment, let alone outrage. In the past, a significant reason for low breastfeeding rates in Scotland was a lack of professional support for new mothers. This is no longer the case, although according to Unicef, support and advice services are still patchy.

Nevertheless, perverted attitudes in the UK, especially Scotland and Northern Ireland, mean it is comparatively rare to see babies being breastfed in public. The inconvenience of finding a private place for the task means many women are deterred from breastfeeding or abandon it prematurely, thus denying their offspring the best possible start in life. Breast milk offers protection against many infections and helps build healthy nerves and brains. In mothers, it reduces the risk of breast and ovarian cancers. It is a sad paradox that babies from the most deprived backgrounds, whose life chances are limited in so many other ways, are least likely to be breastfed. Ms Smith's own constituency of Coatbridge and Chryston has the lowest level of breastfeeding in the country, just 26%. She is right to recognise that small measures, such as those outlined in her bill, can trigger a major cultural change that could deliver such unfathomable benefits to both mothers and babies.