Time to Ween

I’ve been seeing a few articles on breastfeeding pop up in the last few months, mostly dealing with societal intolerance towards it. The most recent being a weblog post a friend shared on Google Reader. The article was on Facebook flagging and removing photos of women breastfeeding their children.

I support a woman’s choice to nurse in public and all that, but it’s a little silly to protest the regulations a website has set for its free service. If they wanted, they could enforce a ban on people they deem ugly and start picking off photos left and right. If Facebook doesn’t want photos posted that contain nudity, that’s really their call. A lot of the protesting mothers seem to believe an exposed breast is no longer nudity when it has a child on it, but it is. I’m not saying that we should be ashamed or uptight about nudity, but it does still fall under that category and whatever rules apply.

That’s really just an aside, though, as what really struck me was how old some of the children were in these banned photos. I always thought that kids only nursed until they were maybe a year old. I went looking to see what the recommended period was (didn’t have a lot going on that day), and the World Health Organization recommends anywhere up to and beyond two years.

It’s a little creepy once you get to a certain age, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t think the child should be old enough to still remember breastfeeding when they turn twenty. I stumbled across this gem of a video while I was searching:

Good lord, those are going to be some messed up adults. In the good ol’ days those young girls would have already been sold into marriage by that age.