In case you missed it, another mom just trying to feed her kid was booted out and humiliated for flashing a little boob in public recently. Only this time it was a hospital that kicked her out. You know, the place that promotes breastfeeding sometimes to the point of bullying new moms? What the? But yeah, it happened. According to Jezebel, Erin Peña posted about the incident on the KCBD Facebook page:
I’m so furious and upset. I just got thrown out of my ObGyn/Pediatrician’s office for breastfeeding! The receptionist told me I couldn’t breastfeed in the lobby and had to go to the bathroom or room in the back. I said I had the right to breastfeed anywhere. She said if I don’t stop she will cancel my baby’s appointment. His appointment was for his vaccines! I refused and she canceled it, so I went to find the doctor thinking she would be reasonable and she wasn’t. She was condescending, kept calling me honey. I said, “No one in the lobby even cared.” She rudely said, yeah they do they just don’t say it to your face.
I said they were wrong and it was illegal what they were doing. She called security on me and I left with the officer. The guy asked what happened and when I told him, even he was like, What? That’s what this was about???
I’m so disgusted. My doctor even lied saying I was walking around with my breast hanging out, even though she never saw what happened. I was just sitting there in a chair. It was sickening.
Even though it’s against the law, I would respect a restaurant’s wishes if it asked me to leave, but a pediatrics’s office at UMC??????
Alright. That’s it. I’m just so sick of writing stories about women getting shit for breastfeeding ANYWHERE. Listen up, silly Americans with your ridiculous puritanical notions about boobs. Women can whip ‘em out and feed their children whenever and wherever they want. If you have a problem with it, YOU leave. Because when it comes down to it, when you freak out about public breastfeeding from a “moral” standpoint, all that says it that you’ve sexualized them to the point that you can’t fathom that they’re there to feed babies, not hit you in your morality meter.
Explain that conundrum to me: sexualizing boobs to the point that you’re morally opposed to seeing them in public. You’re the one sexualizing them! The problem is you, not us moms. So in short: get over your obsession with boobs.
A spokesperson for University Medical Center says they take full responsibility and are working to make sure an incident like this does not occur in the future. Finley also said that UMC Health System supports breastfeeding as the best infant feeding option for moms and babies. Really? That’s nice to hear because Texas law is pretty clear: “A mother is entitled to breastfeed her baby in any location in which the mother is authorized to be.”
Get it? Got it? Good.
A genius Jezebel commenter can have the last word on this one: “It is Texas. She should have just said that her baby was fracking for milk.”
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