Breastfeeding in church: why are we making women feel ashamed?
Updated: Oct 9
I have breastfed two babies, and one of the places where I have sometimes felt most conscious of doing it has been in church.
And I know I am not alone in that.
There are women who feel unsure about whether breastfeeding in church is actually acceptable. Women who feel that they ought to leave the service and find a separate room. Women who feel that they need to cover themselves and their baby with a large feeding cover, regardless of whether that actually makes feeding more difficult. Women who find themselves tucked away in a corner because they are worried that somebody might see a bit too much breast.
And quite frankly, that really pisses me off.
Breastfeeding is a normal bodily function.
God designed women's bodies with breasts that are capable of producing milk to sustain the lives of our babies.
Whatever your personal feeding journey looks like, there should be absolutely no shame attached to a woman using her breasts to feed her baby.
So why, of all places, are women feeling ashamed of doing that in church?
Breastfeeding isn't shameful in the Bible
Obviously, the Bible was written in a very different time and culture from the one we live in now. But I think there is something really interesting about the way breastfeeding appears within Scripture. It isn't whispered about. It isn't treated as something embarrassing. It is simply part of life.
Psalm 22:9 says:
"Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother's breast."
I love the normality of that.
This is a psalm attributed to David, a man, talking completely naturally about being at his mother's breast. There is no awkwardness about mentioning breasts. There is no sense that this is a subject men shouldn't talk about or that feeding belongs hidden away in a women's space somewhere. It is simply an ordinary part of the human experience, used here in this beautiful picture of God's care from the very beginning of life.
And then there is Joel 2:16:
"Gather the people, consecrate the assembly; bring together the elders, gather the children, those nursing at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her chamber."
I think this is particularly beautiful in the context of the Church. Here we have the gathered people of God, the nursing babies explicitly named.
These babies aren't an inconvenience to the gathered people of God. They are named, included and therefore identified as important.
And if nursing babies belong amongst God's gathered people, then surely we need to expect them to nurse from their mothers there too.
So where has the shame come from?
I don't think it has come from God.
I think a huge part of the problem is the way our culture has sexualised women's bodies. Breasts are seen primarily as sexual, rather than as a part of a woman's body that also has the rather incredible biological function of producing food for her baby.
And actually, I think the Church should be challenging that rather than reinforcing it.
If we make women feel that a breast is so inherently sexual that it cannot possibly be glimpsed while a baby is attaching without causing a problem, then aren't we playing into the very oversexualisation of women's bodies that we should be pushing back against?
A breast does not become sexual simply because somebody can see it.
Context matters.
And a woman getting her baby attached to her breast because that baby needs feeding is not making a sexual display of her body.
Modesty and shame are not the same thing
I do want to be really clear here because I can already imagine one of the responses to this being: But what about modesty?
I'm not arguing that modesty doesn't matter. And I'm not suggesting that women should sit topless in church with their boobs out regardless of whether their baby is feeding or not. We live in the society that we live in, and I don't think we can just pretend that our cultural understanding of nudity doesn't exist.
But modesty and shame are not the same thing.
There are plenty of ways to breastfeed without deliberately exposing your body. Some women are absolute experts at it. They can somehow lift a tiny piece of clothing, attach a baby and continue a conversation while nobody around them has even realised what has happened.
I tip my hat to those women.
I was not one of them.
I found discreet breastfeeding quite difficult. Sometimes I needed to actually see what I was doing. Sometimes getting my baby attached involved a bit more manoeuvring than I would ideally have liked. And yes, sometimes somebody might have caught a glimpse of my nipple in the process.
That shouldn't mean that I needed to leave the room.
And I don't think putting a great big cover over a woman and her baby is necessarily the answer either. If a woman likes using a breastfeeding cover, fantastic. But they can make it harder to see what you're doing, harder to get a good attachment and, frankly, some babies absolutely hate having something draped over their head while they're trying to eat.
The answer to that cannot be that the mother must hide herself away instead.
What if you accidentally see a breast?
This probably shouldn't need its own section, but apparently it does.
If you're having a conversation with a woman and suddenly realise halfway through that she's breastfeeding her baby, get over it.
You don't need to stare determinedly at the ceiling. You don't need to suddenly become incredibly awkward. You don't need to make a joke about it, announce that you hadn't realised what she was doing or immediately tell her where the church's feeding room is.
Just carry on talking to her.
Look at her face.
When we have conversations with people, we generally look at their eyes or their face. The same principle applies when there happens to be a baby attached to their breast.
You can acknowledge that she's feeding. You don't have to pretend it isn't happening.
But you also don't need to make a big song and dance about it.
She's feeding her baby. That's it.
I learnt something about my own embarrassment in Kenya
When I was 18, I spent part of my gap year in Kenya. I remember sitting in a room with probably four or five other women when one of the mums started breastfeeding her baby.
And I went bright red.
I wasn't offended. I wasn't judging her. I was embarrassed because, at 18 years old, I don't think I had ever actually seen a woman breastfeed before.
The other women noticed my reaction and thought it was hilarious. Their response was basically: Yeah... and?
For them, in that particular community, there wasn't this big awkward thing happening in the room. A mother was feeding her baby. I was the one who had made it into something unusual because of the culture I had grown up in.
I'm not culturally naive enough to take one experience in Kenya and turn it into a sweeping statement about attitudes towards breastfeeding across Africa, or to pretend that every culture outside Britain views breastfeeding in the same way. Of course they don't.
But that experience stayed with me because it made me realise that some of the embarrassment we think is just a natural response to seeing a breast isn't necessarily natural at all.
We've learnt it.
And if we've learnt it, perhaps we need to question it and take active steps to becoming more self-aware.
Give women somewhere private, but don't force them to go there
I actually think having a comfortable, private space for feeding in church can be a really good thing.
Some women want privacy. Some babies are incredibly distractible and feed much better somewhere quiet. Some women may be expressing. Some might be struggling with attachment and want space to concentrate without feeling watched. There are lots of reasons why somebody might actively choose to leave the main church space to feed.
So please, do provide somewhere comfortable for nursing mothers. Just don't make women feel like they have to use it.
There is a huge difference between saying, "There's a quiet feeding space available if you'd like it" and creating a culture where a woman knows that breastfeeding is something she is expected to leave the room to do.
A breastfeeding mother shouldn't routinely have to choose between feeding her baby and listening to the sermon. She shouldn't have to leave worship. She shouldn't have to remove herself from conversations and fellowship every time her baby is hungry.
Mothers and babies aren't an interruption to church. They are an integral part of the it.
And no, I'm not saying Christian women should breastfeed
I also want to be really clear about this.
Saying that God designed breasts to feed babies does not mean that I believe every Christian woman must breastfeed.
Feeding is personal. Some women choose to breastfeed. Some choose to formula feed. Some combination feed. Some express. And sometimes what we call a "feeding choice" isn't really much of a choice at all.
I know that from my own experience. I desperately wanted to exclusively breastfeed both of my children, but with both of them, I wasn't able to. That's not a huge part of the story I want to tell here, but I think it's important to acknowledge when I'm talking about feeding choices.
Like me, there are women who desperately wanted to breastfeed and couldn't. There are women whose physical or mental wellbeing meant that breastfeeding wasn't the right option for them. There are babies for whom feeding at the breast isn't possible. And there are women who simply make a different choice.
I don't want to replace shame about breastfeeding with shame about bottle feeding. There should be no hierarchy of motherhood here.
If a woman is sitting in church feeding her baby from her breast, let her feed her baby.
If she's sitting in church feeding her baby from a bottle, let her feed her baby.
We really don't need to make either one more complicated than that.
Let mothers and babies belong
I would love churches to think about the culture they create around mothers and babies.
Not just whether they technically "allow" breastfeeding, but whether a woman sitting in the middle of the congregation genuinely feels comfortable putting her baby to her breast.
Because those are two different things.
We can provide quiet spaces without expecting women to disappear into them. We can value modesty without teaching women to be ashamed of their bodies.
We can recognise that breasts can be sexual without pretending that every exposure of a breast is sexual. And we can stop making feeding a baby into something awkward that everybody needs to navigate around.
The Bible can speak about a baby at his mother's breast without embarrassment. It can explicitly call nursing babies into the gathered people of God, alongside the elders.
Perhaps we could learn something from that.
Mothers and their babies belong in church. They belong in the congregation, in worship, in fellowship and amongst the people of God.
And sometimes, while they're there, those babies are going to need feeding.
Let their mothers feed them.
If this has made you think, I write regularly about pregnancy, birth, motherhood and maternity care, with information to help you make your own decisions and plenty to make you think.
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