by Heidi Green
February 21, 2008

The controversy about breastfeeding in public reached the comics page recently in a four-day storyline featured in Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup. It proved to be the perfect format for highlighting the questionable nature of such complaints.

In the first strip, feature character Joan Stone is confronted by a waiter while nursing her baby, Luci, in a café. “One of our customers is uncomfortable,” he tells her, as he directs her to the ladies’ room. Not one to take such ridiculousness lightly, Joan points out that the man who has complained is “nuzzling a buxom bimbo half his age” which “makes [her] uncomfortable.” Why, the reader wonders, should the man’s discomfort be treated as any more valid than Joan’s?

In the second strip, Joan responds to the waiter’s admonishment with surprise. When he tells her she “really can’t nurse” there, she removes Luci from her breast and hands the baby to the waiter before continuing to eat her lunch. Which is more disruptive—the quiet nursing baby of the strip’s first two panels or the crying hungry one of the last?

In the third strip, Joan is talking on the phone with her sister Val and tells her about the lunchtime event. The restaurant where it happened is “that little Italian place across from Hooters,” Joan says. “I wonder what their nursing policy is,” Val sourly responds. How is it that people will accept breasts as sometimes (often?) being presented as the feature entertainment, but complain about them being put to their biological, nurturing use?

The fourth strip neatly summarizes. Again, Joan and Val are talking, this time over cups of tea or coffee. “Can you believe there are still people who object to a mom nursing in public?” Joan asks, noting that a baby nurses “constantly.” Val responds that she hopes such people are “in the minority,” then asks “You’re nursing right now, aren’t you?” Joan answers with a sardonic, “Moooo.” How closely do people really have to look in order to notice when mothers are breastfeeding?

We can talk and talk and talk about breastfeeding, about the rights of mothers to breastfeed their babies in public, and the rights of babies to feed when and where they need. Sometimes, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. Thanks, Jan Eliot, for putting this ludicrous controversy right where it belongs—on the funny pages.