Here's that new Massachusetts law: A mother may breastfeed her child in any public place or establishment or place which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public and where the mother and her child may otherwise lawfully be present.
(Chapter 111 Section 221 MA General Laws). Fair enough, but then: A place of religious instruction or worship
shall not be subject to this section. If someone at your niece's bat mitzvah or wedding Mass — some of the main public places where a mother is likely to have a baby with her and need to keep it quiet — doesn't want you feeding the baby there, the law is too
embarrassed to back you up.
Illinois also perceived a potential church/state conflict and handled it by stipulating, a mother considering whether to breastfeed her baby in a place of worship shall comport her behavior with the norms appropriate in that place of worship. (740
ILCS 137/10) What norms would those be? Do most places of worship issue breastfeeding guidelines to those in attendance? The religious exemptions make breastfeeding look suspect by calling attention to the fact that we are, after all, talking about lactating
breasts, and maybe those are too icky for something as serious as a place of worship. In which case . . . breastfeeding is back to being icky. (Illinois went the extra mile to demonstrate breastfeeding squeamishness, since the state is one of a few with a
Religious Freedom Restoration Act providing an explicit legal protection process for religious exemptions from potentially oppressive laws.)
There is more to breastfeeding law than public breastfeeding, but maybe not as much as you'd like. A lot of legislatures are content to check breastfeeding off their to-do list as soon as they pass a toothless "Breastfeeding is nice!" law. But only eleven states, for example,
exempt nursing mothers from jury duty. Elizabeth Jett of Connecticut must have wished she lived in one of them. Last year, a judge refused to excuse her and finally held her in contempt after she decided to keep nursing instead of contracting mastitis in a jury box.
Despite the media attention Ms. Jett's case drew, the Connecticut General Assembly currently has no bill on its floor to spell out for a doltish judge whom they know to exist that a lactating woman can't sit in a courtroom all day. Why would they need one?
They did their part over ten years ago when they benevolently declared it legal to breastfeed on the streets of Connecticut.
Any law that specifies when, where, or how breastfeeding may be done limits the freedom of mothers and babies to nurse. A few states have factored breastfeeding into custody battles. Maine and Michigan both legislated that during a child's first year of life, judges must take breastfeeding into account when determining parental custody. While granting legal weight to breastfeeding,
these laws also restrict the freedom of mothers to make decisions about weaning (whether for the benefit of the child or the detriment of the father) by imposing a time limitation on that legal protection.
Perhaps the breastfeeding issue with the greatest potential empirical impact is milk expression in the workplace. Some states mandate that clean facilities and sufficient time for pumping on the work site be made available to nursing mothers, while others
boldly "encourage" it. The Iowa legislature is working on a
bill requiring employers to provide expression time unless it would "unduly disrupt the operations of the employer." But most ignore this uncomfortable question which is likely to get them into trouble with employers. They're pleased enough with themselves
for having scribbled out a while back that women who breastfeed at the playground are not criminals.
The advent of breastfeeding law has shown that, whether substantive or cosmetic, it is not an unmitigated good. Any law that specifies when, where, or how breastfeeding may be done limits the freedom of mothers and babies to nurse. It's not worth having
a law "protecting" a personal lifestyle choice if that law is prescriptive or ambiguous. As soon as legislatures begin adding qualifications, they are not protecting but regulating; creating legal limits where none used to exist.
The question is, which breastfeeding rights need protection desperately enough to make it worth risking existing freedoms? There are strong arguments to be made for legislation governing concrete issues like milk expression in the workplace and exemption
of nursing mothers from jury duty. But regardless of the issue, parents would do well to remember that the more defense of our personal rights we outsource, the more likely we are to find ourselves, say, being scolded about our private lives by
commercials underwritten by our own taxes. Don't forget, failing to breastfeed exclusively for your baby's first six months of life is the moral equivalent of logrolling during pregnancy, you selfish degenerate. The contemporary god of individual, national,
and environmental health, divine as health may be, is not above vilifying people who make corporately unhealthy choices, even when those choices are extremely personal. How 'bout that obesity epidemic?
