In case you missed it, in the March 19 issue of TIME, I wrote about why you should care when celebrity moms breast-feed their babies. Why, you ask? Because if you’re a celebrity, people pay attention to what you do. They copy your hairstyle (if you’re Jennifer Aniston), your zany style (if you’re Lady Gaga) and your propensity for breast-feeding in public (if you’re Gwen Stefani or Salma Hayek or, most recently, Beyoncé). Or at least that’s the hope. So it was that breast-feeding advocates rejoiced when Beyoncé appeared to nurse her 7-week-old daughter, Blue Ivy, at a Manhattan restaurant last month. It was a shot in the arm for public breast-feeding, which has been waging a public-relations war in recent months as mothers have held nurse-ins across the country to normalize the concept of feeding hungry babies in public rather than retreating to bathrooms or other private, out-of-the-way spaces. MORE: How Beyoncé’s Public Breast-Feeding Changes the Nursing-in-Public Debate In my recent TIME article (available here to subscribers), I describe an upcoming tea at actress Jenna Elfman’s Los Angeles home, co-sponsored with actress Kelly Preston and former pro boxer Laila Ali, to promote breast-feeding and non-toxic living for babies and children. Elfman detailed her own unique experience with breast-feeding for Best for Babes, a breast-feeding advocacy organization that will be on hand at the April 14 tea. Best for Babes first found Elfman through Twitter where she was tweeting about nursing her second child. Elfman agreed to do an interview with the group, one in a series the organization has done with celebrity mothers. In the words of Bettina Forbes, a Best for Babes co-founder: Like so many mothers in America, Jenna had expected to have no problems breast-feeding and got a rude awakening at the lack of support she received in the hospital. Because of the barriers she experienced, she was never able to get her first child, Story, to latch … so she ended up pumping exclusively for 10 months, a herculean task. Because she was pumping, she was producing![]()
