A couple of years ago Kelli Roman uploaded a photo of herself breastfeeding on her Facebook page. Perhaps she wanted to share this most personal and natural moment with her family and friends. Perhaps she wanted to lure in sex-crazed men with the partial nudity—or maybe that would just be the unintended result. Sadly, somewhere, the worst possibility is the reality, and that is why Facebook, not wanting to have to deal with such issues given the litigious environment in which we live, removed the photo. It reportedly disappeared one day with no explanation to Roman. Even after she forwarded an inquiry, there was no reply.

Maybe Roman should just drop it. It is understandable—again not in a true sense, but given the privacy issues and the pornography that permeate the internet in our highly connected world—why Facebook would feel it necessary to remove any photo showing even partial nudity. Surely if Roman wanted to get her breastfeeding photos out to the world there were other avenues: a personal blog, on-line health and breastfeeding communities, etc.

To most people, however, their Facebook or MySpace pages are their personal blogs, their way they keep in touch with friends and family. They think they own the content, even though they don’t. There is a lesson in this for everybody about everything they publish on community websites. And there is a lesson in Roman’s response.

Instead of going her own way, Roman started a group on Facebook called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook).”

The group’s description reads: “Recently, Facebook has started ‘pulling a myspace’ by not allowing people to post profile pictures of babies nursing. The pictures have been reported as ‘obscene’ and have been removed—their posters warned not to repost or fear being kicked off of Facebook. We’re wondering: what about a baby breastfeeding is obscene? Especially in comparison to MANY other pictures posted all over Facebook that really are obscene. Facebook, we expect more from you, and we expect you to realize that nursing moms everywhere have a right to show pictures of their babies eating, just like bottle-fed babies have a right to be seen. In an effort to appease the closed-minded, you are only serving to be detrimental to babies, women, and society. **Facebook, allow breastfeeding pictures, and stop classifying them as obscene!**”

Too much, some might say. I once heard a security guard tell a young woman breastfeeding on a college campus as she objected to being shooed out of public sight, “Deal with it.” Now tell that to the 61,000 people who signed up for Roman’s group. That’s the beauty of democracy. And the internet. Get enough people to care about something and, online at least, majority rules. Roman’s and many other breastfeeding photos can now be found on her group’s site, but Facebook maintains that it still not planning to alter its terms.

Enter the “Nurse-in.” On December 27^th, Roman has asked that all 61,000 members change their profile photo on their Facebook page to an image of their baby, or a baby, breastfeeding, with the status message reading “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!”

My take on this issue regarding what’s obscene is that here comes 2009 and we’re still having age-old discussions reminiscent of our puritan past.

Facebook (who can do what it wants with its own domain) and its contemporaries are really nothing more than park space—a place people go to unwind and share a bit about themselves. It is actually not public space as owners control their content, but these community websites are set up as if they ARE public space. So why not just ban breastfeeding in a public park? The justification used by those Facebookers and citizens alike who support a ban on public breastfeeding—“I support it (breastfeeding) but I don’t want to see it”—suddenly sounds a lot less like democracy and a lot more like censorship.