Reality Show Will Exploit Long-Term Breastfeeding Moms for the Sake of Our Collective Sanctimony

By Doug Barry | July 8, 2012 | 3:30pm

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From the fiendishly exploitative producers that brought you Dance Moms, a show about a group of winos who keep accidentally entering their embarassed pre-adolescent daughters in dance competitions, comes a reality show about breasts and the toddlers that still rely on them. The production company Collins Avenue has announced that, even as we continue to fret about that star-crossed Time cover back in May, it is developing a show about mothers who breatfeed their children well beyond the 1-year-old mark.

According to the New York Post, government agencies don’t track breastfeeding past 12 months, so there’s no way to really know how many children continue to breastfeed into their motor-skill-honing years. Mothers who do choose to breastfeed their children past that 12-month mark cite World Health Organization statistics that tout the developmental benefits of breastfeeding children at least to the age of two. The benefits of breastfeeding that goes on longer than that, it would seem, should then be weighed against the social stigma of breastfeeding a little person who has started communicating his or her desire for sweet, delicious breast milk with increasingly articulate phrases, culminating with, “Moooooommm, I’m thirsty and there’s no Capri Sun left in the fridge…”