When I was nursing my first baby, I spent some time visiting another state. One night, our hosts wanted me to go to a movie with them. Unfortunately, the nearest theater was over an hour away from their rural home. The round-trip drive plus the movie would take about five hours. There was simply no way my daughter could go without breastfeeding for that long.
The theater was dark, but when my baby needed to eat, I wore a nursing shawl just in case. I even moved away from my group to an empty part of the theater to ensure that I wouldn’t bother anyone.
While I was nursing, a theater employee approached me and told me to leave the theater. She said there had been complaints about me.
“I’m covered,” I whispered.
“People can still hear it,” said the employee.
I looked down and strained to hear my daughter’s suckling sounds over the loudspeakers. I couldn’t hear any noise coming from my baby, but I could hear loud chomping noises from people eating popcorn throughout the theater.
I was new to motherhood and this was my first encounter with breastfeeding discrimination. In later years, I might have handled a situation like this by complaining to the manager. Maybe I would have received an apology and the go-ahead to care for my baby as I needed to, or at the least, my money back for the movie I was not permitted to watch.
At the time, I didn’t know what to do. Ashamed, I picked up my things and my baby and left the theater. I found no seating in the lobby and after what had already happened in the comparative privacy of the dark, I was afraid that I would be scolded again if I sat down on the floor to nurse in the lighted lobby, so I reluctantly fed my baby on the dirty restroom floor. Theater patrons stepped over me to come in and out of the bathroom stalls.
I now know that situations like this are commonplace. Employees of theaters, restaurants, stores and other establishments that welcome the public will usually leave mothers alone as they feed their babies, but if a customer with a low tolerance for breastfeeding complains, they don’t know what to do. Sometimes, these untrained employees feel obligated to satisfy the complaining customer by harassing the mother and baby.
Frequently, such situations become public knowledge. More often than not, business owners respond to the bad press by immediately issuing a policy confirming that breastfeeding is allowed at their establishments wherever mothers and their babies are allowed to be.
More proactive business owners make such a policy before they find themselves in such an embarrassing situation. They train their employees so they know that when a customer complains about a breastfeeding mother, the correct response is, “I’m sorry if that bothers you, but breastfeeding is allowed here.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not one of these proactive organizations. Despite professed support for motherhood and families, no policy in support of breastfeeding is written on our books. Cases of breastfeeding discrimination at our churches have been publicized, but unlike organizations that respond swiftly to remedy the problem, the church continues to let local, male priesthood leaders, none of whom have ever lactated, discriminate against breastfeeding women and disrupt the necessary feeding of infants.
Church leaders, please create a policy in support of breastfeeding like those that already exist in so many other organizations. The restored Church of Jesus Christ should be capable of protecting women and children at least as well as a theater, a restaurant or a store.
If you haven’t already, please visit Let Babies Eat, fill out the survey, and see what actions you can take to help improve the Latter-day Saint church experience for nursing women.
I’m sorry this happened to you, April. It’s really sad that, as you said, the Church isn’t a proactive organization that works to make breastfeeding easier. I’m glad you’re bringing more attention to Let Babies Eat.
Thank you so much for this piece, April!
I’m horrified at how you were discriminated. No nursing mother should have to sit on a dirty bathroom floor, and yet so many of us first time moms don’t know what else to do in the face of a hungry babe.
We need the church to be better.
I’m so sorry you had to go through this, April! Trying to nurse in public is stressful enough without worrying someone’s going to shame you and make you sit in a public restroom.
Nearly 40 years ago, for the better part of a decade, spanning 5 different wards from the west to the southern US, my wife nursed our children in sacrament meeting, Sunday school, relief society, young women’s and primary. Nary a word from anyone. What’s the problem?