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COPYRIGHT 2005 Mothering Magazine
Like many women, Yeemay Su Miller brings her children with her whenever she goes shopping. In August 2003 she went to H&M, a clothing store in Braintree, Massachusetts, with her two in tow. When her ten-month-old daughter began to fuss, Miller did what many nursing mothers do: she found a quiet, out-of-the-way corner of the store to breastfeed her. To Miller's surprise, the store's manager approached her and asked her to leave. "You can't do that here. Someone else might see it."
"He couldn't even bring himself to say what 'it' was," says Miller, a registered dietician and lecturer at Simmons College. With animated gestures, she describes her exchange with the manager, who insisted that she feed her baby in the bathroom.
"I asked him, 'Do you want to eat in the bathroom?' When he answered 'No; I pointed to my baby daughter and asked, 'Do you think she wants to eat in the bathroom?'"
The manager then told Miller that breastfeeding her baby daughter was against the store's policy, even though he could not provide her with a written copy of the policy. "I couldn't believe that he treated me as if I was doing a criminal act," Miller says, her expression becoming more serious and indignation deepening her voice.
Miller decided to take her story to the Massachusetts Statehouse in Boston the following October and to testify before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary, which was reviewing proposed breastfeeding legislation. At the opening of the hearing, the bill's sponsor, Representative David Linsky (D-Natick), urged his colleagues to vote favorably on the measure, which would protect any mother who is breastfeeding a child from interference or harassment in any public place in Massachusetts. "It is outrageous that in today's society, women who are merely breastfeeding their children would be told to stop feeding their children," Linsky said as he addressed the joint committee. "It's the natural right of every mother to feed her child."
Miller wasn't the only mother who testified before the joint committee about harassment in public places. While Maria Blanco, a breastfeeding peer counselor for the Women, Infants, and Children program, waited to sign paperwork in the Suffolk County Registry of Probate in Boston, a court officer told her to stop nursing her six-month-old daughter. When she refused to comply, the officer left and returned with a supervisor. "This is a lot of harassment and discrimination against breastfeeding, even though it is promoted as a health benefit" Blanco told the committee.
Over the past decade, the national trend to enact breastfeeding laws has fallen into two main categories: maintaining a woman's right to breastfeed in public, and protection against discrimination in the workplace. In addition, laws in some states exempt nursing mothers from jury duty, consider a mother's nursing relationship with her baby when deciding custody cases, or require hospitals and doctors to provide information on breastfeeding to new mothers. New York's corrections law allows nursing babies up to one year...
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