Herald On Sunday Editorial: Too much fuss over a bottle boob
5:30 AM Sunday Feb 5, 2012
Breast-feeding advocacy groups were furious about the bottle-feeding shown in the anti-smoking advert. Photo / Thinkstock
Sometimes you can't hear yourself think for the noise of special-interest groups. A Health Sponsorship Council anti-smoking campaign, which starts on television tonight, was to have featured All Black halfback Piri Weepu bottle-feeding his baby. The imagery - advancing the campaign's key message about rejecting a future of smoking - emphasised the role of parents in bringing their kids up as non-smokers.
But the ad was re-edited after a furious response from breast-feeding advocacy groups, led by the La Leche League and the New Zealand College of Midwives, who said it undermined campaigns to promote and support breastfeeding, particularly among Maori.
It was probably a blunder that the HSC was not sufficiently up to speed with the orthodoxy on breast-feeding to have ensured that a bottle-feeding shot - one of many the film crew had gathered in a day of filming Weepu's father-child interactions - didn't make the final cut.
But the naysayers' reaction has a rather distasteful whiff of patch-protection about it. On occasions in the past, when an ad about something other than cycling has shown someone cycling without a helmet, helmet advocates have screamed blue murder. But no one else would have noticed.
The substantive message that viewers would have taken away from the sequence that has been edited out is of a tough-guy father showing tenderness - an image rich in beneficial implications, in an age when men's physical abuse of children is a constant heartache. No one who does not spend all day worrying about breastfeeding, would have seen it as undermining of the idea that breast is best.
Perhaps we could start with all these 'messages' that we get bombarded with. We have been turned into a lectured-to society - breastfeeding, smoking, eating, drinking, child-raising, the environment, and so on and so on and so on.
Maybe it's all well-meaning, but who knows.
I'm all for mothers breastfeeding their babies, whenever, wherever. I never understand those who object to it.
But you would think that a bit of TV clip showing an All Black and Maori man feeding his baby daughter via a bottle would be one of those really 'positive' messages that lecturer-messengers and the rest of us would be delighted with.
Wouldn't you?
Do the breastfeeders and the midwives college understand the the psychological and emotional gearshift men make when a baby is in their arms and it takes the bottle and drains it?
Or is it all about them, their ideological view, and what in their view must be?
In saying that, we do bottle-feed so that I can actually have some form of sleep during the night, and so that Dad has time with his Daughter. I am often riddled with guilt for this, sometimes to my own detriment.
Knowing that I'm not the only one out there who does this certainly helps, and I don't think it should have been pulled from the ad. Not everyone breast feeds you know. And its not necessarily because they don't want to.