Breastfeeding as sexual deviancy?

Jane of What About Mom sent me this 2003 report from the Dallas News, 1-hour Arrest, about a couple who were arrested on felony charges for supposed child pornography. The evidence of their crime? A photo of the mother breastfeeding her infant son that she had sent to a photo developing lab. The couple's two boys were removed and placed into foster care. Several months later, the state of Texas finally dropped the case, and the 1-year-old son was finally returned to his parents.

Cultural attitudes towards breastfeeding, especially breastfeeding in public, aren't just a trivial matter of "covering up" and "being discreet" versus "letting it all hang out." They can cause real harm when, as in the Mercado case, a family's private photo of a mother nursing her son can be interpreted as child pornography.

From the article:

The service was fast, the judgments even hastier. Never did Jacqueline Mercado imagine that four rolls of film dropped off at an Eckerd Drugs one-hour photo lab near her home would turn her life inside out, threaten to send her to jail and prompt the state to take away her kids.

For Mercado and her family, last fall was a happy time, one they wanted to record and save in the venerable tradition of the family photo. Johnny Fernandez, Mercado's boyfriend, had just emigrated from Lima, Peru, ending a yearlong separation, and on top of that, it was their son's first birthday...

In one--the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison--the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast.

After Mercado dropped off the film for processing, a technician viewed the images and decided they were "suspicious," according to a police report. As required under Texas law, he immediately contacted local police. Mercado says that when she went to pick up her pictures, the clerk told her there would be a delay, and then only returned three of the four sets of prints.

To Richardson police, who arrived at the store that afternoon and apparently made up their minds from the content of the pictures alone, this was nothing short of a felony case of child pornography. "We thought they contained sexuality," says Sergeant Danny Martin, a Richardson police spokesman, explaining why two Richardson police detectives began pursuing a criminal case. "If you saw the photos, you'd know what I mean."

With nothing else to support their contention that the photos were related to sex or sexual gratification, the police and the Dallas County District Attorney's Office presented the photos to a grand jury in January and came away with indictments against Mercado and Fernandez for "sexual performance of a child," a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charges centered on a single photo, the breast-feeding shot. Fernandez and Mercado say they took it--although the child had ceased breast-feeding--to memorialize that stage of their baby's development.

Read the rest of the article here.