Is this porn? (CCL Sean Dreilinger)

Seattle resident Lauren Ferrari has been banned from Facebook for seven days for  ”violating community standards.”

Her transgression?

Posting a photo of her five-year-old pretending to nurse her two-year old. The caption read:

She says she’s nursing her baby.

Within 24 hours Facebook had removed the photo and booted Ferrari.

Even Seattle’s finest got into the act. Though not child porn, they say, the photo is poor parenting, because it’s impossible to control where the image may end up. (Especially ironic since Seattle added public breastfeeding to its list of protected civil rights barely three months ago.)

Says Stefanie Thomas, of the SPD/Washington State Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force:

There’s no real way of actually getting wherever that image ends up down off the Internet. So that’s something that this family, that these girls, are going to have to ultimately deal with.

Ri-i-i-ight. But since it’s not child porn, since it’s actually a picture of two small children playing feed-the-baby, what exactly are the girls going to have to “deal” with?

News flash: Boobs are for food

Boobs are for feeding babies. All other uses are secondary.

For millenia, and until quite recently, breasts were the only way to feed babies. And they’re still clearly the best way:

• The American Academy of Pediatrics urges mothers to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months, and keep on breastfeeding for at least the first year. After that, they encourage breastfeeding for as long “as it is the right choice for you and your baby.”
• The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends breastfeeding “up to two years of age or beyond.”

Bottles aren’t bad, provided you don’t live in a developing country where the water is polluted. Or you’re so poor that you over-dilute the formula to fill your baby’s tummy. Or you’re so tired that you use dirty bottles.

They’re not bad, but neither are they best. Breast milk (or should I write “b—-t milk”?) is the  perfect nutrition for children two and under.

And here’s another news flash. Children learn by playing pretend. By mimicking adult activities.

So-o-o-o, let me get this straight:

• We want to encourage more women to breastfeed. (New York City, for example, has talked most of the hospitals in the city into keeping the free formula samples under lock and key in an effort to do just that.)
• But we encourage children to pretend to feed babies with bottles. (Check out any toy department and notice how many baby dolls are sold with little plastic bottles.)
• And we come unglued  when young children pretend (remember, that’s how children practice and learn adult behaviors) to feed babies the best way. The way we want to encourage.

According to HuffPo, in January Facebook took down a page with photos showing girls pretending to nurse their dolls. Later, they put the page back up and apologized for their gaffe.

Now they–and the Washington State Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force–owe Lauren Ferrari a similar apology.