Well, it’s the start of the new year and I can’t think of a better way to dive back in here than to tackle that heated, controversial topic . . . breastfeeding. It seems every couple of months, we hear of a news item about a nursing mom who was asked to leave a store, shopping mall or restaurant because she had the nerve (insert sarcastic tone here) to breastfeed her child in public. Oh, the horror! Of course, this being the 21st century, we now don’t have to settle for such infantile behaviour occurring in the real world; now we see it being brought onto the internet, thanks to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook deeming pictures of nursing mothers as “pornographic” and “obscene”. Excuse me a minute while I pick my jaw up from the floor.

Well, thankfully, breastfeeding moms are not taking this lying down. Kelli Roman is one of several women who have had pictures they posted of themselves breastfeeding their child removed from their Facebook page and being given the cursory explanation that the site doesn’t allow images that are “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit” in nature. Roman’s response to this censorship was to start a new Facebook group called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!“, a group that today has a membership of over 97 000 Facebook users.

Now, I’ve read how some of these pictures were removed by Facebook and MySpace on account of other members citing them as violating the site’s Terms of Service in regards to the posting of inappropriate images. So after some digging around the Net, I was able to find an example of one of these pictures that ended up being banned by Facebook just this past week on December 28, 2008 because it was deemed “pornographic” and/or “offensive”. Click here to continue reading »”Yet Another Breastfeeding Controversy – Here We Go Again”