Melissa Tracy was shopping an iParty store in the eastern Massachusetts town of South Weymouth one day last spring when her infant son began crying. The baby was hungry, so Tracy settled down on the sales floor and began nursing him—only to be chastised by a store employee who told her it was inappropriate to breastfeed there, where children might see her.
The incident hit the media and caught the attention of outraged breastfeeding activists. And while the story had a happy-enough ending—higher-ups at iParty eventually apologized to Tracy and hosted a party for nursing moms at the store, to stave off a planned protest "nurse-in"—it points to an unhappy, not to mention surprising, reality: In Massachusetts, breastfeeding women have virtually no legal protection.
"Massachusetts thinks it's a leader in a lot of areas," says Marsha Walker, a nurse and board member of the Massachusetts Breastfeeding Coalition. "But what it is doing right now is exposing all its breastfeeding women to discrimination. … You have no legal protection for breastfeeding in public, and you have no protection at the worksite. So mothers are extremely vulnerable."
According to the current issue of Mothering magazine, the majority of states legally protect a woman's right to nurse in public, although most have no mechanism for enforcement. Eight states, including Connecticut and Vermont, have laws that give a woman the power to bring legal action if that right is violated. Massachusetts is one of just five states to have no laws protecting public breastfeeding.
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Not that breastfeeding advocates—sometimes known as lactivists—aren't trying. Currently, several bills are pending at the Statehouse, including one filed by state Sen. Susan Fargo, a Democrat from Middlesex County, that would protect a woman's right to nurse in public and would allow the attorney general to bring civil action against someone who violates that right. Fargo's bill would also guarantee a woman's right to pump breastmilk at work during her regular breaks and would require employers to make "reasonable efforts" to provide a private place—and, no, it cannot be a toilet stall—for pumping.
If guaranteeing a woman's basic right to feed her child in varied settings isn't motivation enough, there are plenty of pragmatic reasons to offer these protections. Numerous studies show that breastfeeding offers undeniable health benefits to both babies and mothers—something that should catch the notice of anyone concerned about healthcare costs. Yet year after year, bills like Fargo's have failed to pass.
Walker ascribes the failure in part to political pressure from interest groups, like restaurant owners who don't want to be forced to allow breastfeeding in their establishments. But don't discount the plain old-fashioned embarrassment many adults—legislators among them—feel when it comes to certain parts of the female body.
"Some people, they're just very—I don't know how to describe it—they're extremely squeamish about someone breastfeeding in public," Walker says. "It goes back to the problem some people have in this country: They think breasts are for selling beer, or for men."
While the Senate has been generally supportive of breastfeeding protections, the bills tend to hit a snag in the House, where Speaker Sal DiMasi has been unwilling to bring the bills to a vote, Walker says. "We can't even get an appointment with these people," she says. "Many are simply just unwilling to talk about it. You email, you talk, you write, and they don't do anything. It's very hard."
Meanwhile, as breastfeeding advocates—a lobby that's not especially well-funded and depends heavily on the work of volunteers—fight to move their cause forward, another bill, which would benefit the deep-pocketed formula industry, is before the Legislature. That bill, filed by Rep. Harriett Stanley, a Democrat from West Newbury, bears the innocuous-sounding name "An Act Relative to Maternity Patients' Rights."
In fact, the bill is geared to the interests of formula sellers; it ensures that hospitals continue the dubious practice of handing out free formula samples and other corporate-sponsored goodies to new mothers. Critics say that practice undercuts women's efforts to breastfeed their babies, especially in the early, most vulnerable days, and gives the impression that formula use is endorsed by the hospital. They also question why hospitals would be in the business of helping a corporation market its product to an essentially captive audience. (The answer: because they want the cash, free formula and other incentives the companies hand out to cooperative hospitals.)
About 15 Massachusetts hospitals have already stopped handing out formula-company goody bags unless a mother is bottle feeding or asks for one, according to the Breastfeeding Coalition. In 2005, the Massachusetts Public Health Council tried to make this a statewide practice by approving new regulations that forbade hospitals to hand out the bags. But then-Gov. Mitt Romney killed the regulation by replacing several PHC members who supported the ban with new members who carried out his wishes. Stanley's bill, breastfeeding advocates say, appears designed to ensure that such a ban never comes up again.
"I didn't go to nursing school to market for the formula companies," Walker says. Particularly grating is the fact that the product being pitched has been shown to be medically inferior to breastmilk, she adds: "No other unit in the hospital has been bought off the way the maternity unit has been. You don't see coupons for Big Macs in the cardiac [unit]: 'Make sure your arteries clog up so we see you again.' Hospitals don't do that to their patients. It's unethical."
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Tanya Lieberman is a Valley-based breastfeeding consultant who teaches classes to pregnant women and runs clinics for new moms. She also writes a blog (http://breastfeeding.blog.motherwear.com) about breastfeeding issues for Motherwear, a Northampton company that makes nursing clothes. The blog is filled with stories from around the country about breastfeeding women being scolded or harassed by store employees, security guards, even hospital staff.
If there's an upside to stories like Melissa Tracy's experience at the iParty store, it's that they make plain the need for breastfeeding protections, Lieberman says. "It takes an incident with press attention for the politics and policy to line up," she complains. "You can't argue anymore that it's silly—there's something concrete."
While people who object to public nursing often cite the "inappropriateness" of a woman baring her breasts, in reality, Lieberman says, mothers know how to nurse discreetly. "Women don't want to expose themselves," she notes. The real issue, she says, is the difficulty many people have thinking of breasts in a non-sexual way.
Lieberman does see signs of a cultural shift toward a more general acceptance of breastfeeding—for instance, mom characters on sitcoms talking about nursing their babies. "It's a topic that makes people shift in their seats, because it's about bodies," Lieberman says. "But maybe if we can laugh about it, it's getting better."
Of course the laughter is not always positive, as on an episode of The Office last season when a woman pumped breastmilk at her desk while a creepy coworker ogled her.
To Lieberman, real cultural acceptance would mean bills like Fargo's would be unnecessary. "We shouldn't need laws to [protect a woman's right to breastfeed]," she says. "We should have a culture that supports breastfeeding women. You shouldn't need the threat of a law hanging over your head."?
mturner@valleyadvocate.com
