While the MomsRising discussion boards are filling with comments about the recent assault on airplane breastfeeding. Amy at Mojo Mom has logged a must-read post about how truly radical an act breastfeeding is. This new event reminded me of something I’d written about in the past, the Starbucks nursing shame.

Over at Playground Revolution I’ve posted the story from The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars about Lorig Charkoudian, a Maryland mother who was told to stop nursing in a nearly empty Starbucks, and who responded with a website, letters to corporate VP’s, and picket signs. We need to remind ourselves of the history here, that there are national patterns in which mothers are publicly humiliated when they breastfeed their kids.

We need to make sure that mothers are socially protected in states that actually give them the right to breastfeed in public. We really need activism for a federal law, so that this protection won’t be so patchwork. Major irony: the proliferation of scary, ‘You must breastfeed” billboards, sponsored by the federal government, in states where breastfeeding isn’t even legal.