In a message dated 98-05-19 04:40:24 EDT, you write:

<< From what I have seen, this is pretty common on
 RR, Kratt's Creatures, OTOH is excellent about portraying nursing couples of
 all species.  This week they showed some babies nursing from their moms >>

The consummate episode for us "bf radicals who also happen to be normal moms"
has got to be Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.  He did a whole show on nursing and it
runs *every* season.  Shows lots of animals nursing, as a setup, then it is
him sitting in a room full of nursing moms.  (Looks like he snuck into a LLL
meeting!)  The wonderful part is that the moms are nursing OPENLY, and you see
closeups of the nipple and baby's mouth, etc.  Nearly the whole breast is
exposed on a few of the women, and the absolute best part was when the camera
got a close-up of milk spraying onto a bay's face--takes the mystery right out
of a kid's questions about breastfeeding! He askes lots of questions of the
moms and is basically "in awe" and conveys the normalcy and "rightness" of the
act of bf very well to his young audience.  Mr. Rogers also has a series of
books for young children--one of them is about a neew baby in the family and
there are wonderful shots of mom nursing too.  On the next page there is dad
giving a bottle with the copy being something like: "if a baby doesn't
breastfeed, she gets her food from a bottle instead"--bf is the status
quo...even the picture is smaller and less aesthetically pleasing.

Jeers to Sesame Street, which used to have a segment with a nursing mom.  Now
they have several older segments running where babies have bottles as a matter
of fact....Hmmmm, seems like the bf segment disappeared and the bottles
appeared right around the time Sesame Street started being sponsored by one of
the boogeymen (a formula company).

Joy (who got rid of our tv when our son was born 4 yrs ago, but who sees PBS
all the time at playgroup and friends' houses.)