In the midst of packing a bag prior to struggling through TSA and boarding a Delta flight on what may be the busiest travel day of the year I am stopped dead in my tracks at two news items tonight that leave me incredulous. Today a group of women are demonstrating at PDX in support of a woman removed from a Delta flight for having the unmitigated gall to breast feed her baby in flight. Earlier in the day I read an article penned by a female business executive, who after returning to work after the birth of a child and while maintaining her corporate position was required to travel…all the while expressing and storing milk for her baby which allowed her husband to feed the child in her absence and ensuring an on going supply just as nature intended.
Well, apparently the neanderthals are on the loose again and breast feeding a child in flight is not to be tolerated and the TSA in their ongoing wisdom and in the needless, mindless bothering of the “American People” have decided that expressed breast milk is on the list of things that are routinely confiscated and binned. So much for the health and welfare of our future society. Come on now, we are all aware of the benefits of a mother’s milk. Are we not?
So much for the rights of women and their ability to compete, to nurture and to nourish. What on earth have we become when we inhabit a society that throws up such obstacles and displays an inability to reason through them? So the message to the working/flying mother right at this moment is that there shall be no breast feeding on board Delta flights and the TSA in effect says there shall be no feeding of expressed breast milk in flight either. That looks like a recipe for hungry babies and uncomfortable mothers. That looks like a load of pap to me!
This subject is not too far removed from memory as just last weekend I had my 18 year old son join me in England for a weekend to visit his octogenarian grandparents. In doing so he closed in on his 500,000th mile flown with me. Not only was he breast fed aboard some dozen different airlines as an infant, he was also fed expressed breast milk by me as we often traveled together absent of his mother. I can’t imagine myself or his mother having been able to fulfill our obligations to business or family under the current baseless strictures. All I can say in closing is that I feel for the families involved, I feel for the passengers seated close to complaining infants, unable to suckle to relieve the pressure in ears as they take off and land or are just plain hungry and I feel for all of us at large who daily have to tackle the “nanny state” we are fast becoming.
Of all the millions of miles I have flown on Delta…to end up this disquieted and astonished at their response. Of all the times I have passed through the TSA screeners…and not to be surprised at all. This is becoming something of an all too common formula… and I imagine that like me, it wants to make an infant “spit up”.