Breastfeeding 1-2-3

Canadian Woman Wins Breastfeeding Settlement

by Angela White, J.D., breastfeeding counselor on December 22nd, 2007

Last April, Ruth Ellen Cummings nursed her 2-week-old baby in a Napanee, Ontario, Canada truck stop restaurant until the assistant manager asked her to cover up. Cummings didn’t have anything to cover the baby, and refused to use the napkin the manager offered. In an interview in the Bellevue Intelligencer, Cummings explained:

I was so upset because I was all alone and I felt everybody was looking at me. When my husband came back I told him ‘we have to go.’ … He thought I was kidding and I started crying hysterically.

After doing a little research on-line, Cummings decided to file a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission against the American-based Flying J truck stop chain.

‘It really affected my self-esteem,’ she said. ‘I’m an educated woman and (the manager) made me feel so vulnerable and powerless. I’m my daughter’s food source and I felt like I couldn’t protect her.’

For Cummings, the complaint wasn’t about seeking money, but rather about her baby’s right to eat. In mediation, she asked for and received CDN $100 (enough to pay for gas to drive back to the restaurant and pay for a replacement meal for the one her family never got to eat), a letter of apology, and promises to put up a poster explaining the rights of nursing mothers and to have the staff receive sensitivity training on breastfeeding in public by early 2008.

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POSTED IN: activism, breastfeeding, law, nursing in public