‘Nurse-in’ planned at fashion store

VANCOUVER—The fashion industry is known to bare a little breast when it comes to selling its wares, but the attitude doesn’t appear to extend to nursing mothers.
A Vancouver PhD student plans to file a human-rights complaint after she says she was driven out of public view at a major fashion retailer because she was breastfeeding her baby.
The incident has prompted a growing Internet protest campaign and plans for a “nurse-in” at the Vancouver store today.
The controversy began when Manuela Valle went on a shopping trip with her family to the giant H&M chain’s store on Granville Street. While her husband was trying on clothes in a fitting room, the couple’s two-month-old began to cry.
So Valle, standing near the cash, lifted one side of her T-shirt and placed the baby on her breast.
“The baby covered my breast—you couldn’t see anything,” she said yesterday.
But a sales clerk appeared and asked Valle to move into a fitting room, the 34-year-old recalled.
“She said that what I was doing offended other customers—and that there were children around,” Valle said. “I was shocked. She said, ‘Sorry, this is store policy.’”
Another employee showed up to direct Valle into the room while someone else spoke over a walkie-talkie; it prompted other customers to stare “like I was stealing something,” she said.
Valle said she finally sat down in the fitting room to nurse her daughter, Ramona. At this point, her baby had stopped crying but Valle was in tears.
“I felt humiliated. I didn’t want to be put in isolation.
“Why do people still see breastfeeding as something obscene, as something to be ashamed of?” she added. “It’s all about the over-sexualization of breasts.
“We’re forgetting about their primary function.”
The store, which specializes in young and hip clothing, said it all came down to a misunderstanding. A spokeswoman said staff merely were offering Valle a place to breastfeed so she could be more comfortable.
“An H&M staffer was trying to offer the customer the option of using one of our fitting rooms if she wished,” Laura Shankland said from Toronto. “We’re very sorry if she felt uncomfortable or uneasy.”
Valle said she was not offered a choice.
The controversy already has made the rounds of breastfeeding websites and blogs, and fuelled denunciations on Facebook from mothers across Canada.
One woman in Vancouver said she has returned a load of recently-purchased H&M clothes and will boycott the store, which has 39 locations across Canada.
Advocates say the incident points to mixed attitudes toward women’s breasts.
“We say to moms: ‘Breastfeed, but don’t do it in front of me.’ It means mothers are relegated to caves, or can’t leave their homes,” said Sandra Yates of the La Leche League’s Vancouver office.
Groups including the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Paediatric Society, and the World Health Organization all tout the health advantages of breastfeeding and recommend babies be fed breast milk exclusively for their first six months.
“There is a definite public health benefit. These mothers are saving us tax dollars. We should be thanking them, not sending them off to another room,” said Teresa Pitman of La Leche League’s national office in Ontario.
“We have a funny idea about breasts in our society,” she added. “They use them to sell cars. And women can go topless in this country. So this kind of puzzles me.”
Ironically, British Columbia led the way in protecting women’s breastfeeding rights when a provincial human-rights tribunal ruled in 1997 that prohibiting breastfeeding at work was a form of sex discrimination.
A spokeswoman for the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal said yesterday it would review any complaint it receives; the provincial human-rights code bans discrimination in the delivery of services.
According to Statistics Canada, 85 percent of Canadian women breastfeed their newborn babies.
Today’s planned lunch-hour protest at the H&M store at the Pacific Centre mall calls for a “nurse-in” inside the store and a placard protest outside.