Health Care Law Gives New Boost to Breastfeeding Mothers
January 31, 2011
MSNBC – When Stacey Weiland was a gastroenterology fellow and a new mother she had trouble finding the time or a place to pump breast milk at the Colorado hospitals where she worked, and often ended up in a bathroom stall or just not pumping at all.
Weiland would wear heavy sweaters in order to hide any milk leakage from co-workers and got little sympathy from colleagues who saw her requests to breastfeed as an inconvenience.
“It was like I was asking to go out and smoke,” she recalled.
“The field of gastroenterology is very male-dominated,” she added. “I remember one time I told one of them that I had to go pump, and he thought that I needed to go lift weights.”
Weiland’s story is not unusual. Many working moms find it challenging to continue to breastfeed when they return to work because there is often little employer support and few if any good locations for them to express milk during the workday.
Pumping at work: Tales from the closet floor
But that’s all expected to change thanks to a little-known provision in the still-controversial health care bill signed into law by President Barack Obama.
The Affordable Care Act amended the Fair Labor Standards Act, and for the first time employers will be federally mandated to provide women with breaks and a place to breastfeed.
“My objective is to make the rights under this new law accessible to as many working moms as possible,” said Nancy Leppink, Deputy Administrator of the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division. To that end, the DOL is asking for public comment before it embarks on writing the guidelines for the new nursing law. (The agency is accepting public comment through Feb. 22 via this Web site.)
The new nursing law “will require unique solutions that working moms and employers need to find solutions for,” Leppink explained. “In order for our guidelines to be effective for both working moms and employers, we need to get as many perspectives as possible. We really need to hear from working moms, working dads, and employers, about what challenges this new law presents and how to overcome those challenges.”
Working moms are in a unique position. They can now have input in molding one of the biggest work-life initiatives since the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, instead of just accepting what employers design for them.
“This is a huge step for women’s equality and average women should weigh in,” said Portia Wu, vice president for the National Partnership for Women & Families.
“It’s really really important in this economy because a lot of women want to go back to work, or have to go back to work right away because they don’t have paid leave or maternity leave. Having something like this allows women to keep breastfeeding. The workplace is catching up with the reality of women’s lives.”
And the new law couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
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