PIcture: TV3
Though unconnected, the Weepu story followed close on the heels of widespread protest against Facebook which had effectively banned a photograph of a Sydney mother breastfeeding her baby from one breast while expressing milk with a pump from the other.
Both stories were about censorship. Facebook had censored the photograph of the Sydney woman because it breached its rule that a woman’s breast could only be shown if she were using it to feed a baby; any other depiction of a naked female breast was regarded as a gratuitous display.
The La Leche League, the New Zealand Colleague of Midwives and Plunket had used their influence to persuade the Health Sponsorship Council to censor a 2-second film clip of Weepu bottle-feeding his baby because, they argued, it would damage their message that ‘breast is best’. La Leche League director Alison Stanton observed, ‘It’s really important that those messages are consistent across the board.’
The idea that a 2-second shot of even someone as famous and admired as Piri Weepu giving his baby a bottle, would persuade any parent to stop breastfeeding their child in favour of bottle-feeding is so utterly preposterous that it will not bear examination. And any ‘damage’ that it did would be infinitessimal compared to the damage this episode has done to the not entirely favourable opinion that many New Zealanders already appear to have, not of the League’s goals, but of the stridency of their methods in promoting those goals. As a piece of public relations this was a disaster.
Equally disastrous were their attempts to control that damage. They declined invitations to appear on Close Up, Campbell Live or, to my knowledge, any other TV programme, leaving the field open to the already greatly loved and admired Piri Weepu to feature in a 6-minute interview on Campbell Live, holding his beaming and utterly captivating daughter, while he demolished their inane and fundamentally anti-democratic reasoning.
Linda Williams of the Maternity Services Consumer Council fronted up to defend that reasoning in an interview with Mike Hosking on Close Up. She struck me as a pretty smart woman, but the inconsistency of asserting the right of mothers to breastfeed in public and be shown in the media doing so, while denying the right of fathers (and I assume many mothers) to be shown in the media bottle-feeding their offspring, seemed to escape her completely.
It needs to be recognised that this isn’t just an injunction against a famous footie player bottle-feeding his baby on TV; it is an injunction against any man or woman being shown on New Zealand television bottle-feeding a child. That is what ‘consistent across the board’ means in Alison Stanton’s statement, ‘It’s really important that those [pro breast-feeding] messages are consistent across the board.’ In other words, ‘no message or image suggesting a viewpoint contrary to that of the La Leche League or other proponents of breastfeeding should ever be televised or published.’ That sort of injunction belongs in totalitarian states, Ms Stanton, not in New Zealand. And it invites the sort of name-calling with regard to your organisation’s methods of persuasion that I have avoided in this piece, but frankly came perilously close to using.
What is totally beyond me is why the Health Sponsorship Council bothered to seek your opinion at all and why they were so lily-livered as to act on it. Bottle-feeding may not be ‘best’, but it does not kill 5,000 Kiwis a year, as smoking does. If the sight of Piri Weepu holding his baby daughter in his arms while he bottle-fed her had served to help get across the message that a famous All Black, a ‘real man’, cares so much for the welfare of his family that he has declared his home a smoke-free zone; and if that message had stopped even one more person from smoking, it would have been well worth it. We will of course never know.
La Leche has a positive message, but the delivery of that message has served to make many women who are unable to breast-feed feel like failures. I know because I have met some of those women. When you have moved from informing parents on the relative merits of breast- and bottle-feeding to wanting to censor alterative viewpoints or practices, you have moved from helpful persuasion to harmful fanaticism.
This, as Alison Stanton sought to persuade us, was no ‘storm in a teacup’. The premise of the League’s and its supporters’ argument for deleting the 2-second clip was fatuous, but what it told us about their approach was positively frightening.