A Kitchener mother is speaking out after she says she was told by a retail employee that she couldn’t nurse her baby in the store.
Allisha Derbyshire said in the 14 months she’s been openly breastfeeding her twin daughters, she’s never experienced pushback, until last week.
"I was shocked," she said.
On Saturday, Derbyshire was in a women’s clothing store at a Hamilton shopping mall, when one of her daughters started to get fussy.
She found a chair in the store to nurse her screaming daughter, but a worker, who Derbyshire said identified herself as the manager, told her she wasn’t allowed.
"She just said, 'You cannot nurse in my store,'" Derbyshire told CTV News. "She was pretty adamant about it. She was rude."
Derbyshire said the employee then told her to go feed her baby in the bathroom instead.
"She probably didn’t take her lunch to the bathroom that day, and I don’t think it’s fair that she asked me to do that with my baby."
Eventually Derbyshire left the store and began breastfeeding her daughter in the hallway of the mall.
Since then, she has called the store's head office and launched a complaint against the business. She has not yet received a reply.
"I think that they should apologize," Derbyshire said. "I just don’t think any mom should feel embarrassed, or that they can’t go out in public with their baby and nurse them. It’s not fair and I don’t think that we should be shamed or ridiculed. I don’t say to the formula feeding moms: 'Oh, you can’t feed baby.' You know, there’s no difference."
The Ontario Humans Rights Commission states that breastfeeding mothers have rights, which include the right to breastfeed a child in a public area. It goes on to say: "No one should prevent you from breastfeeding your child simply because you are in a public area. They should not ask you to 'cover up,' disturb you, or ask you to move to another area that is more 'discreet.'"
“We ask caregivers to breastfeed and we don’t make it easy for that to happen,” said Kate Rossiter, a community health professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. “That’s a real problem.”
Rossiter said the onus isn’t on a breastfeeding parent to make others around them feel comfortable.
“If you don’t like the look of breastfeeding, look somewhere else,” Rossiter said.
