Woman Sues Store Over Breast-Feeding Incident

A Los Feliz woman filed suit against Borders Books & Music on Wednesday, charging the store’s management and staff with denying her right to breast-feed her 4-month-old daughter inside the store.

The store’s general manager apologized for the incident.

Kerry Madden-Lunsford, an author who has done book signings at the Glendale store and other Borders locations, and her attorney, Paula D. Pearlman, of the California Women’s Law Center in Los Angeles, held a press conference in front of the store Wednesday to announce the filing of the suit.

Lunsford said she was sitting in the children’s book section March 6 breast-feeding her daughter, Norah, under her sweater when a store clerk told her that a customer had complained that the breast-feeding had upset her 7-year-old son.

Lunsford said she was then told by a store manager, “You can’t do that in here,” and was offered the options of nursing Norah in the bathroom or leaving the store.

Pearlman and Lunsford said the store was in violation of a 1998 state law passed allowing women to breast-feed in public.

“I was shocked,” said Lunsford, whose first-person account of the incident appeared Wednesday in The Times. “A nursing mother has the right to feed her infant when the baby is hungry, whether she is at home or at a bookstore.”

Diana Villicanna, the store’s general manager, also present at the press conference, issued an apology. She said the two store employees were unaware of the law, and that the two employees have since been “re-educated.”

Following the press conference, Borders posted signs that state, “Feel free to breast-feed your baby.”

Pearlman said the apology wasn’t enough and that the case would remain filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.