When Breastmilk is a Lethal Weapon
Think there’s nothing nicer than a lactating mama? Think again. A woman in a Kentucky jail decided to use her ability to squeeze her breastmilk and make it shoot out to spray a corrections officer in the eye.
Now she’s facing assault on an officer charges, and the case is bringing to the forefront one big concern about breastmilk.
It may be good for baby, but it’s considered a biohazard anywhere else. That’s what the deputy sprayed in the Kentucky incident had to deal with. Just as though she’d encountered blood or feces, WKYT describes the CO as having to be decontaminated.
Breastmilk is, after all, a bodily fluid, and women have been known to pass diseases to their children via breastfeeding. But blood doesn’t spurt all over the place (at least not unless there’s something seriously wrong), and unless you’re a monkey, most of us aren’t accustomed to throwing their feces.
But have you ever been the mom who went to breastfeed and had a spurting incident? I know moms who claim to have been able to shoot it clear across the room (and this wasn’t hyperbole – they proved it). Looks like you better be careful who you hit from now on!
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It seems like any person who is crazy enough to squirt a person with breastmilk as some sort of weapon is crazy enough to fling feces or draw blood for the express purpose of getting it on a person.
While definitely disrespectful and punishable, squirting breastmilk does not constitute exposing someone to a biohazard. CDC says “No special precautions exist for handling expressed human milk, nor does the milk require special labeling. It is not considered a biohazard. The Universal Precautions to prevent the transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Hepatitis B virus, and other bloodborne pathogens do not apply to human milk.”
You don’t need to be a monkey to throw feces…..ask any corrections officer about it. They have lots of jerks behind bars that throw ‘cocktails’ of feces & urine at them.
You shouldn’t go around expressing any bodily generated fluid on anyone, so I’ll go ahead and agree with the assault charge.
I’d never deliberately squirt my breast milk at anyone– well scratch that! Ok, maybe the door to door solicitor or the Jehova’s Witness that comes a knocking on my door and I can’t pretend to hide b/c they saw me through a window already– but I have been known to get it 1/2 way across a large room! Hey, you can’t help the flow when the babe pops off just as the letdown occurs and you are full, full, full of breast milk!
Logical – I’ve heard that from a number of moms!
You know, I know nothing about the circumstances and agree it’s gross, but part of me wonders how many hours that lactating woman was in jail and if she was waaaaay past due for nursing her baby. Maybe she was begging to pump (manual or otherwise) and was denied. If I had to sit there with mega-engorged breasts and was denied, I might get a little feisty, too. Not in *that* way, but you know… Maybe I’m reaching?
You know ugh, now that you mention it…I hadn’t thought about that but on one unfortunate occassion, I cleared the full length of the living room because the babe couldn’t latch on quickly enough and I was about 2 hours past feeding! And I could see that, as I’d dare say the vast majority of the population doesn’t get that you can’t turn it on and off (I say this as more than one person yelled at me for BF in public with my newborn thrasher, saying “just put it in a bottle!” Well, fine, but then what happens when he’s eating from a bottle and I’m engorged, dumbass?)