As most people know by now, Salma Hayek’s very public
breastfeeding in Sierra
Leone was not just a moment of compassion for
a hungry child. It was that, but it was also a calculated—and noble—attempt to dispel
the notion in some parts of Africa that breastfeeding
women can’t have sex. Given this entrenched belief, you can probably guess how
husbands feel about their wives breastfeeding.
It’s easy to see such an urban legend as shocking, but, as Ada
Calhoun points out in TIME, the U.S. certainly has its fair share of breastfeeding taboos—most notably,
against cross-nursing. Indeed, many media outlets and online commenters were disgruntled
at best by the YouTube video of Hayek nursing another woman’s child. (EW.com
awarded the video “biggest eyebrow-raiser” of the day.)
According to Calhoun, no American institution will
support informal cross-nursing, citing concerns about “the
possibility of transmitting infections, a decrease in supply for the donor's
own baby, psychological confusion on the part of the infant, and the fact that
the composition of breast milk changes as children get older.”
Hayek’s very public cross-nursing demonstrated that there
are certainly instances in which none of these concerns are relevant. The Sierra
Leonean baby she breastfed was born on the same day as her daughter and Hayek
knew him to be healthy. She’s not in any danger of her milk running dry from
one emergency feeding, and no one would argue that any “psychological
confusion” the baby boy may have experienced outweighed the benefits
of assuaging his hunger.
Photo: The Daily Mail
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