Facebook Deletes Nursing Wear Page

Did you think Facebook didn’t need to #suckit anymore? You were wrong.

Momzelle is a successful, small, local Toronto business run by the sister-brother team of Christine and Vincent Poirier. They sell made-in-Canada nursing tops that are specifically designed to allow for comfortable and discreet breastfeeding. While Momzelle does have a small store-front location (1593 Dundas St. W.), the bulk of its business is in online sales. So of course it had a Facebook page to help promote the nursing wear and breastfeeding in general. The page posted positive quotes about breastfeeding and informative news links and boasted between 600 – 800 weekly readers and 1600 fans.  It also had pictures like this:

Christine received a form email from Facebook on Monday afternoon informing her that her page had been taken down for not following the rules. It either promoted heinous hatred, personal attacks, or obscenity. Christine promptly replied to the email stating that there must be some kind of mistake and filled out a complaint form. At the time of writing this post, 30 hours later, she had yet to receive a response.

So what gives? Clearly, there is nothing offensive or obscene about the kind of image posted on the Momzelle Facebook page. In fact, the entire point of the nursing wear is to allow women to breastfeed discreetly and not have to expose their breasts. Christine is confident that no actual person working at Facebook could have viewed her page and deemed it obscene. It must be that some Facebook users have reported the page as “sexually explicit,” she speculates, and that after a certain number of reports a robot automatically takes down the page. “I love Facebook,” Christine told me. “I advertise with them. I can’t believe this is a real Facebook decision.”

The struggle for Christine and Vincent now is twofold. They need to get Facebook to hear them and have an actual person review their page and hopefully have it reinstated. They also need to address the problem of broader acceptance of public breastfeeding. The fact that any number of people would report a page like that is mind boggling. It also goes to show that rejoinders that claim that women just need to cover up and be discreet are often false in themselves. The very idea of a baby suckling on its mother’s breast is enough to offend some people.

When she first got the email, Christine couldn’t help herself. “I felt so shamed, like I was told to get out of a restaurant.” Which is, of course, exactly what her product is designed to avoid.

257,747 (and counting) people have already joined the Facebook group Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook). You should join too.

Update: Momzelle has a new Facebook page up and running now. They could sure use some more likes.

Update: Thanks to a influx of support, Facebook has reinstated the original Momzelle page.