Breastfeeding and martial arts. For a long time, those two words wouldn’t have been associated in the same sentence, but world champion athletes like Karen Antunes are changing that for women around the world. After years and decades of going to the car or bathroom to breastfeed, female martial artists are now just feeding their babies.
A beautiful moment as a mother, and a proud moment as an MMA fighter, Sarah Davila recently shared an incredible post fight breastfeeding moment on her Facebook page. As her husband/coach cut her wraps off, she did what any mother would do. She fed her baby.
She captioned it:
“Moments after I left the cage last night I was reunited with my little ones and before my wraps were even off, my fussy baby looked to mama for some milk. I contemplated sharing this photo because of ridiculous people and the stigma with public nursing but this was just too awesome of a moment. Feel free to scroll past this post if it offends you. Just one more reason I’m a badass. You don’t stop chasing your dreams because you have kids. You just bring them with you.”
Jiu-Jitsu Times reached out to Davila to see what surprised her the most about the response to her photo. She responded, “What surprised me most about the reaction to the photo is that I received zero negative feedback. It reached over a thousand people and everyone only offered supporting comments. I was truly blown away by this because unfortunately that is not the normal reaction for a lot of public breastfeeding mothers. It was a refreshing surprise. The only negative comment was actually towards me being a female fighter. (eye roll).”
As people around the world (including myself) are sharing moments like these to #normalizebreastfeeding, it’s incredible to see the positive response to Davila’s photo.
