It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the color pink is everywhere. Pink ribbons fly, people run 5Ks in pink tutus and even the NFL, with its rocky-at-best gendered history, trades out some team colors for pink.
With the spotlight on breast cancer and the nearly constant sexualization of breasts in the media, we overlook the biological purpose of breasts: to nourish babies.
There is a clear stigma in the U.S. against nursing in public. That stigma follows new mothers everywhere from Disney World to airplanes, despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s call for increasing the practice.
The Affordable Care Act attempted to mitigate the problem by requiring that any employer with more than 50 employees provide a separate room with a lock for lactation that is not a bathroom.
UNC falls under this requirement and has made some improvements to its lactation spaces in recent years. Currently, there are 13 rooms designated for lactation across campus. This obviously can’t service the entire population of both employees and students.
The University recently committed $100,000 of funding over two years to provide for increasing lactation needs, in addition to requiring all new buildings on campus to include a lactation room. We applaud these enormous steps to creating the best possible environment for new moms on campus.
Breast pumping requires lugging around heavy equipment and storing milk in refrigerators, so lactation rooms serve an important purpose for moms who want to continue working or attending class while still breastfeeding.
Women shouldn’t feel the need to remove themselves from the public sphere as they support their baby and use their breasts as biology intended. New lactation spaces would provide them safety from prying eyes and snide remarks while facilitating and normalizing their breastfeeding.
In the next few years, lactation rooms ought to cover a larger swath of campus, rather than remaining primarily in middles and South Campus buildings, often far from classrooms.
