Thoughts on Gisele's 'breast-feeding law'

Parenting communities were in a tizzy today after excerpts from a Harper's Bazaar UK story were released quoting Boston mom Gisele Bundchen saying that breast-feeding should be mandatory. " ... there should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breast-feed their babies for six months," Tom Brady's wife says in the story.

In Boston, the founder-editor of BostonMamas.com, Christine Koh, said she's all for breast-feeding, but that she can't agree with Bundchen's desire to mandate the practice. "It's very difficult to make a statement like that. For some people, they try and they try and try but it doesn't work out. With that, and with so many things with parenting, you can't dole out judgement like that. Every situation is different."

Koh said she wonders whether Bundchen's many blunt comments about pregnancy and childbirth since the model gave birth to her son Benjamin have simply been lost in translation. Koh's family is Korean, and she says sometimes people who speak English as a second language use harsher words than they mean to.

Maybe ... but "there should be a worldwide law" sounds pretty clear to us.

Koh also says that her friends and readers do take celebrity statements about child rearing personally --- and that most have found a role model in another honorary Boston mom, Jennifer Garner, who has been candid about having trouble losing her baby weight and is often photographed in jeans and sweatshirts with husband Ben Affleck and their kids. "I think it's a little harder to stomach the celebrities who say, "Oh, you can drop that baby weight in four weeks,'" Koh said. "Sure you can -- if you have a trainer."

A pre-baby Gisele in Milan. (REUTERS/Dylan Martinez)