‘Don’t stare – we need to breastfeed’: Indian mothers campaign to confront stigma
Breastfeeding is even more important in a developing country like 1.25 billion-strong India where many cannot afford formula milk and daily-wage earners often take their infants to work
Clutching his elephant toy, Avyaan’s conversation is pretty much limited to a happy gurgle, but the nine-month-old might be about to go down in history for helping make breastfeeding in public more socially acceptable in prudish India.
Public breastfeeding carries a social stigma in much of the world – a situation that World Breastfeeding Week until August 7 hopes to change – but in highly conservative India it is particularly taboo.
The country’s hundreds of millions of women are expected to dress modestly, and even a glimpse of a breast during feeding is a strict no-no, all too often inviting disgusted demands to desist and even unwanted sexual advances.
So this is what a petition brought in little Avyaan’s name – by his middle-class lawyer parents Neha and Animesh Rastogi – and currently before the Delhi High Court is aimed at chipping away at.
“I was flying to Bangalore and my co-passengers were male. My son was exclusively on breast milk and it was so difficult to feed him there,” Neha Rastogi, 30, said at her home in Noida, a satellite city on the outskirts of Delhi. “We want the government to set aside space in flights and at all public places because we can’t feed in the open simply because the breast is just seen as a sexual organ.”