Breast-Feeding Mom Goes Public Over Scene

Stephanie Simpson was calm and content, having just finished breast-feeding her 10-month-old daughter, Chloe, when she noticed an ice rink manager approaching.

Customers were complaining, the woman at the Oxnard Ice Skating Center told her, and wouldn’t Simpson be more comfortable relocating to a locker room?

The young mother was incensed. She lashed out at the manager, telling her to “get out of my face or you’ll have a lawsuit on your hands.”

“It was humiliating to be put in a position where I had to fight for my rights, cause a scene and look like a crazy lady,” said Simpson, 32. Her other daughter, 4-year-old Haley, has taken ice-skating lessons at the center weekly since February. “It was really a crummy experience.”

Sparing nursing mothers such embarrassment was the purpose of a 1997 state law that gives women the right to breast-feed their children in any public place.

But three years after its passage, and after at least one high-profile case against a retailer that prohibited a Los Angeles woman from breast-feeding, many businesses have no policies regarding the issue and are apparently not educating their employees about the law.

Frank Ogaz, general manager of the Oxnard skating center, said his business was generally unaware of the statute until last weekend’s skirmish with Simpson. In fact, he later found it was an employee at the center, not a customer, who was the source of the complaint.

“If they didn’t know [about the law] before, they do now. We all sat down with everyone who was there and spread the word,” Ogaz said. “To be honest, until Saturday afternoon, I didn’t realize how big an issue it really was.”

Increasing awareness about mothers’ right to breast-feed in public is exactly why Simpson said she was so enraged at the incident and why she went public about her experience.

*

The right to breast-feed in public received substantial attention last year when Kerry Madden-Lunsford of Los Angeles sued Borders Group Inc. after employees at the retail book chain’s Glendale store told her it was against that company’s policy to allow women to breast-feed in public.

Three months after filing her lawsuit, she agreed to an undisclosed settlement and the corporation initiated a companywide program to inform employees of the statute.

Paula Pearlman, a supervising attorney at the Los Angeles-based California Women’s Law Center, who represented Madden-Lunsford, said it’s common for employees to seek to satisfy other customers rather than enforce state law.

“They’re pressuring her to change her conduct to make others feel more comfortable, and you can’t do that,” she said. “Store owners cannot discriminate on the basis of their customers’ preferences, whether it be race, gender or breast-feeding.”

Pearlman said the burden is on business owners to know the law and to comply with it. The law allows for women to sue business owners for damages in civil court.

The statute does not, however, require companies to educate their workers about its provisions. But, Pearlman said, the burden is on business owners to know what the law is and to follow it.

“It’s part of the responsibility of being open to the public,” she said.

At the Chuck E. Cheese’s in Thousand Oaks, general manager Jaime Cossio said he often sees breast-feeding mothers and considers the sight “the nature of our business--serving moms, dads and kids.”

*

But one of his employees only hours earlier had said he would “say something” to a breast-feeding mother if he or one of his customers was bothered.

Cossio said he had assumed all of his managers knew about the law, but he will inform them of its provisions at the next staff meeting.

Some businesses go out of their way to make breast-feeding mothers feel comfortable, and have earned the designation of a “Breastfeeding-Friendly Establishment” from an Internet-based support group called MomsNET. One such retailer is Target Stores, which has a companywide policy that supports mothers’ right to breast-feed anywhere in the store, including in fitting rooms.

Elizabeth Baldwin, a legal advisor to La Leche League International in Illinois, said other businesses, such as Wal-Mart and The Discovery Zone, had run into legal trouble after store employees asked breast-feeding moms to leave public areas.

“That’s exactly why you have the law,” she said.

In Simpson’s case, although ice rink managers said they never asked the Santa Barbara resident to stop breast-feeding or ordered her to leave the business, they did “violates the spirit of the law,” Pearlman said.

The manager “was trying to do it in the nice way so she could make the other customers happy,” Simpson said. “But it’s my legal right to feed my baby, and I knew it was wrong for them to say anything to me.”

Women’s rights groups and a host of other support organizations have tried for years to change the general public’s perception of breast-feeding, Baldwin said.

Supporters stress that breast milk reduces the likelihood that babies will develop gastrointestinal infections, respiratory and ear infections, pneumonia, meningitis, diabetes, leukemia and other childhood diseases.

Next week, Aug. 1-7, is World Breastfeeding Week.

The celebration commemorates the signing of a declaration, sponsored by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, recommending that women breast-feed for a minimum of two years, Baldwin said.

“The theme this year is education and your right to breast-feed,” she said. “People think it’s indecent exposure, when it’s just a basic act of nurture. And people don’t seem to have a problem with breasts unless there’s a baby on board.”