Pull up a POÄNG chair, folks, and have a seat. It's gonna be nothing but breast milk and meatballs for the rest of the summer.
Of all the furniture joints in all the towns in all the world, a security guard had to order a nursing mother to go do "that" in the restroom at the Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Granted, they were talking about the family restroom, which is nice enough to throw a kid's birthday party in, but still.
I figure Ikea has until Monday to crawl across Brooklyn on their knees and beg for forgiveness, and then hang giant "Nurse Here!" signs over every chair and sofa in the place, because that's exactly where the lactivists are going to be lactating.
IKEA Redhook breastfeeding incident [brooklyn baby hui listserv via gothamist]
JPG: Your Breastfeeding Rights In New York [nyclu.org]
Oh, crap, I can hear the helicopters for the Ninja Hit Squad of the Park Slope chapter of the La Leche League warming up now...
Funny since I just read an article saying that Sweden's breastfeeding rate is 97%. I think corporate IKEA would not approve of what happened in Brooklyn!
On an average Saturday morning the IKEA in College Park, MD is a festival of breastfeeding. I'm pretty sure this is a rogue security guard, perhaps spurred on by a complaint from another customer.
That family room is so nice I couldn't imagine nursing anywhere else in the building, until the time I showed up and three women were already there. Ikea might want to get a handle on that issue, even if their security guard isn't representing corporate policy here.
As a long-time employee of IKEA, I can attest to the support that the company provides to their nursing-mom employees! Every location has a private lactation room in the ladies locker room with calming environment and I never felt bad or guilty leaving a meeting to go pump. This is definitely not representative of IKEA as a company... perhaps a misguided, ignorant security guard (who might be employed by a 3rd party)!
This probably isn't the forum for this random thought and it will either be deleted or flamed, but I always wondered if one of those lactivist protests couldn't be broken up with a bunch of creepy leering guys ogling the nurse-in participants.
It's gonna get ugly once Obama hears about it and calls the security guard stupid.
The family room at our IKEA is a glorified handicapped bathroom with a chair right outside the stall door. There's no way I'd nurse in there sitting next to a trash can filled with poopy diapers. Sounds like the Brooklyn one is a lot nicer! The "Mother's Room" at our Babies R Us is the same way. The smell of dirty diapers is so overpowering I don't know who could sit next to it, so I use the display rockers.
I think that's what happens with most of these "nursing woman banished" stories is that you get one person who's not used to seeing it or is ignorant about the whole thing and gets the company/restaurant/etc. in "trouble".
Man, I'm having the flashback here. We don’t have none of them fancy Ikeas in these parts, what we do gots is a Babyland* (I think, who remembers, really. It’s an hour away.) There’s some sort of nursy-parenty room there, and it’s of the baby-ghetto style: You want to wrap yourself in plastic wrap before touching anything, and maybe burn your shoes afterwards. And just try going in there to change your kid’s diaper, what with the beams of momhate searing your skin.
*Babys R’ Us. Googling tells us that Babyland was the family-run store where we got our deathtrap crib, conveniently out of business about a month afterwards after 69 years.