Nursing Mothers Welcome - Heather MacLean

“Do we really want our children eating in the bathroom?” asked Heather MacLean.

MacLean, a registered nurse and certified breast feeding specialist, suspects that most people would respond with a resounding “no,” and yes, many breastfeeding women feel that when, for example, they are shopping, dining out or at a park, the only place to nurse their babies without judgment is a public restroom.

As the mother of four daughters herself, MacLean is all too familiar with the stares, sideways glances and flat-out rudeness involved in nursing a child in public. When she was a young nursing mother, MacLean used to spend time with several other nursing mothers, many of whom had their own stories of public humiliation.

“One of the mothers told us about when she was at a restaurant with her husband and her older child, and she was breastfeeding her younger child,” said MacLean. “I know she was discreet because she was never anything other than that, and the waitress called two busboys over to gawk at her.”

For MacLean, this type of behavior toward the simple act of feeding a child was appalling. “I thought, I have to do something because this society should be supportive,” she said.

MacLean, a Saugerties resident, feels that on the whole, the United States could be much friendlier toward nursing mothers by allowing them to nurse comfortably anywhere they desire. To emphasis her point, MacLean created a short seven minute documentary film, Nursing Mothers Welcome.

Set to Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony,” the film features images of mothers “breastfeeding discreetly, comfortably, happily, with society’s support in a variety of public places, by a variety of women, lots of different cultures,” said MacLean. In the film, which has no speaking parts, mothers nurse their children in parks, restaurants, while walking down the street, at home and even in their parked cars, images that MacLean feels are vital for not just mothers, but all people to see.

“I think what’s important would be if the United States was more comfortable and supportive like the rest of the world,” said MacLean. “I think that many of us in this culture have never even seen it done.”  

In fact, prior to the birth of her own first child, MacLean had never seen anyone breastfeed. “It would have been much easier for me,” she said, “and I did research to find out how l could accomplish [breastfeeding], and I really thought about it and thought what would be my best gift to the world with the least amount of effort.”

MacLean began compiling images and information for the film in 1989 after conducting an experiment in which she distributed questionnaires to her fellow sociology class members. The survey asked her classmates to rate a number of breastfeeding scenarios on a scale of ”beautiful and natural” to “vulgar and indecent” to determine, “what people’s gut feelings were about breastfeeding if you wrote about it or discussed it.”  

She received some very interesting responses to her questionnaire. For instance, those surveyed were more likely to deem nursing a two year old child anywhere as “vulgar and indecent” than they were the example of a woman breastfeeding “at a business meeting with men.”

Many of the reactions she received from her survey were emotionally charged, but MacLean isn’t interested in a heated debate, which is one of the reasons she decided not to include a voiceover or interviews in the film. 

“I’m chicken,” admitted the soft-spoken MacLean. “I don’t like people to argue with me.”  

But her dislike of conflict wasn’t the only reason for this omission, MacLean said. “People actually learn more from imprinting,” she said, ‘from watching someone else do something, than they do from the written word or from the verbal word.”  

And now, many new mothers are learning how to breastfeed by watching MacLean’s documentary, which she completed in 1992 and is now in its fifth edition. “Is is used in Northern Dutchess Hospital, and has been since 1992,”said MacLean. “The Maternity Infant Care Unit in Manhattan ordered eleven copies, because they put in on the WlC-approved list of New York state.”  

MacLean hopes to make the leap to world-wide distribution soon. “Since there are no words, there’s no translation needed,” said MacLean. “Its loved and used and extremely powerful in a very gentle way locally, and it’s time for the rest of the world to know about it”.  

For the film, MacLean photographed nursing mothers both here and abroad, and while all portray the special intimacy of breastfeeding, one image is particularly close to MacLean’s heart: that of her own daughter, who along with her husband helped edit the short, nursing her child as she gazes out a window at Niagara Falls. Despite the topic, MacLean said the film shows no actual footage of breasts and is “suitable viewing for the whole family.”  

Nursing Mothers Welcome will be shown on May 17 at 7 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Catskill Congregation on Sawkill Avenue in Kingston. It will also be shown in Saugerties at Inquiring Mind Bookstore on Monday, May 21 at 6:30 p.m.

Kandy Harris