Of Breasts and Boobs, Part II

On Saturday February 17, 2007, Leigh Bellini's 6-month-old son Enzo had the nerve to get hungry while the family shopped at the Berkshire Mall in Wyomissing, PA. As Enzo is breast-fed, his mother settled down on a bench beneath a tree and began to feed little Enzo. Within minutes, Mall security approached her and demanded that she cover her son (and his source of food) with a blanket. She refused. The situation escalated when these rent-a-cops advised that it would be best if she she fed their son in a public restroom or the car. When they refused, the rent-a-coppers threatened to call the police and have the couple and their son physically removed from the mall.

Of course, the mall's management said there's no policy against public breastfeeding at the Mall, and that security behaved inappropriately. But, y'know, I really have to wonder what kind of "secret" policy they have. More accurate, it turns out, would have been to state that the mall has no policy period, which is every bit as dangerous a having a policy banning public breast-feeding. Of course, "the matter is being investigated". But what will be the penalty for violating a non-policy? No free donuts for the rent-a-coppers for a month?

In any case, the following week-end about 50 mothers gathered to breast-feed in public at the mall. Needless to say, nothing happened -- apparently there is power in numbers.

On another note: in response to the above events, countless mothers with MySpace accounts began putting up pictures of themselves breastfeeding their children. Note that none of these pictures were exercises in public nudity, and as I explained previously it takes a sick mind to assume that breast-feeding exists as a means of sexual titillation. Obviously, the powers-that-be at MySpace have sick minds: they deleted the images, saying they were sexually stimulating and obscene. One can only hope that by the time baby Enzo grows up, society has grown up as well.