Not All Workers Aware of Breast-Feeding Law

Stephanie Simpson had just finished breast-feeding her 10-month-old daughter, Chloe, when she noticed the ice rink manager approaching.

Customers were complaining, said the employee of the Oxnard Ice Skating Center. Wouldn’t Simpson be more comfortable relocating to a locker room? the manager asked.

Simpson, 32, lashed out, threatening a lawsuit. “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, whose 4-year-old daughter, Haley, was taking ice-skating lessons.

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 Glendale retailer, many businesses are apparently not educating their employees about the law.

Frank Ogaz, general manager of the Oxnard rink, said his business was unaware of the statute until last weekend’s skirmish with Simpson. In fact, he said, he found out that it was a rink employee, not a customer, who was the one complaining.

“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.”

The right to breast-feed in public received substantial public attention last year, when Kerry Madden-Lunsford of Los Angeles sued Borders Group Inc. Employees at the chain’s Glendale store had told her it was against company 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 alert all employees to 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.

What happened to Simpson, Pearlman said, “violates the spirit of the law.”

Women’s rights groups and a host of other support organizations have tried for years to change the public’s perception of breast-feeding, said Elizabeth Baldwin, a legal advisor to La Leche League International.

“People think it’s indecent exposure, when it’s just a basic act of nurture,” she said.