Selma Hayek in Sierra Leone
Salma Hayek traveled to the African country Sierra Leone last fall for the second annual Pampers/UNICEF program to stop the spread of maternal and neonatal tetanus. While there she encountered a woman trying to breast feed her baby.
“The baby was perfectly healthy, but the mother didn’t have milk. He was very hungry. I was weaning Valentina, but I still had a lot of milk that I was pumping, so I breast-fed the baby,” she says, her voice dropping.
“You should have seen his eyes. When he felt the nourishment, he immediately stopped crying.”
Malnutrition is so rampant in underdeveloped countries such as Sierra Leone that doctors there say they would like to see women breast feed for two years. Unfortunately that is rare because culture mores forbid sexual intercourse with breastfeeding women, so men urge their wives to quickly stop.
“It is the best thing you can do for your child, not only the bonding, that’s how you build the immune system, so in a country like Africa imagine how important it is for the mothers do that,” Hayek said. “But here, there is the belief that if you are breast-feeding you cannot have a sexual life so the husbands, of course, of these women are really encouraging them to stop and this is just a taboo.”
Nightline’s Cynthia McFadden followed Hayek on her goodwill trip and cameras rolled as she breastfed the one week old baby boy, who ironically shares the same birthday as her daughter.
View Salma Hayek breastfeeding video below.
photo: WENN