The story of the woman on the airplane resonates with me because I have flown cross-country many, many times with my children when they were mere babes in arms.

It’s hard enough flying with children let alone having to worry that someone might be offended if you breastfeed.

Yet,  I do  feel that Barbara Walters has every right to complain about her discomfort. Watching other people breastfeed is not for everyone. Some find it beautiful. Others find it distasteful or titillating. Some just think it’s a private act that should go on behind closed doors.

Barbara Walters has every right not to want to sit near a baby on an airplane (breastfeeding or no). There is nothing more stressful than listening to a baby cry on a flight. I’m a nervous flyer to begin with and a crying baby can put me over the edge.

Still, I believe that breastfeeding mothers should be able to breastfeed their babies in public: on airplanes, in train stations, on the subways. Wherever. It is up to the mother where she wants and needs to do it.

By expressing her discomfort with breastfeeding on "The View," Barbara Walters has ignited a full-fledged debate about a woman’s right to breastfeed.

Yet, something else has come up in the process. While breastfeeding may be a right, it should not be a standard by which mothers are judged.  In some of the comments I received, I detected the implication that breastfeeding is superior to other approaches.

While there are many health and emotional reasons why "breast is best," it is very important that it does not become an issue that  pits one style of mothering against another, or one mother against another.

Women can be very  judgemental when it comes to mothering styles. And they are very hard on each other probably because they are so hard on themselves. The quest to be the perfect mom (and overcome the difficulties of being a mother in American society) sometimes results in mothers taking on a "Holier than Thou" view of things.

Women judge one another about breastfeeding, the food they feed their kids, cloth diapers vs. paper, how they put their kids to bed, when they put their kids to bed, where their children sleep (in the parent’s bed or not) and so on.

It’s almost like we’re judging each other when we should be coming together to raise awareness of how difficult it is to juggle motherhood with everything else that’s expected of us with so little support from the government and the culture.

One commenter wrote:
Barbara Wa Wa has never even breastfed!!! Her daughter is adopted. I
think she should keep her mouth shut about things she obviously knows
nothing about!!!

That one gave me pause. I am very sensitive to the ways that some kinds oif motherhood are held above others. And I find this apalling. I don’t think you are any less of a mother because you don’t breastfeed, or if  your child is adopted, or if you have to work full time, etc.

ABSOLUTELY NOT. 

A woman named Suzanne wrote this in response to the previous commenter.