Earlier this month it was a Texas mall that was in trouble after a guard asked a woman to take her infant into the bathroom if she wanted to breastfeed. A few days later, however, Great Britain’s The National Gallery was hit with a similar controversy after an attendant asked a woman breastfeeding her 11-month-old daughter to move to what the BBC describes as a “mother-and-baby room” if she wanted to continue breastfeeding her daughter.
Of course, as pro-breast feeding advocates were quick to point out, this was a bit odd considering that many of the paintings in The National Gallery depict infants breastfeeding. The woman asked to leave, Catherine Gulati, was quoted by the BBC as noting that,
I thought it was ironic because in another room there was a picture of a bare breast with milk squirting out of it called the Milky Way.
As in the Texas mall incident, The National Gallery blamed the incident on an overzealous attendant and said that breastfeeding is allowed anywhere in the gallery.
Source:
Gallery regrets breastfeeding ban. The BBC, July 9, 2004.
The Attendant at The National Gallery Stops Woman from Breastfeeding by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.