Wednesday, February 26, 2014
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Breastfeeding mom offered an apology Legal action. Lisa Garrett considering filing a human-rights complaint over courtroom incident
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Olympic long-track speedskaters Gilmore Junio, left, and Denny Morrison arrived back in Calgary from the Sochi Olympics on Tuesday afternoon and posed for photos with fans like five-year-old Carter Davidson. CANDICE WARD/FOR METRO
Alberta Justice has apologized and instructed its security staff not to interfere with breastfeeding mothers in courtrooms after a woman nursing her baby was told by an armed sheriff to cover up or take the child into a bathroom. Vauxhall resident Lisa Garrett said she was shocked when a sheriff approached her in the corner of a Taber courtroom on Feb. 4, where she had begun to breastfeed her nine-month-old son while waiting for her husband to have a traffic offence T:10” addressed.
“I had done the best I could to have modesty,” Garrett said. “But then this female sheriff came up to me … and she said if you can’t cover him, you’re going to have to go to the bathroom to feed him.” Garrett said she knew her rights but felt intimidated and “didn’t want to cause a big fuss in the courtroom,” so she agreed to be escorted to the bathroom, but told the sheriff she wouldn’t nurse there. “I said to her, ‘Do you eat your lunch in the bathroom?’” Garrett said she was then offered an empty office to nurse in, but was interrupted by a lawyer and client who needed the room, and eventually ended up back in the bathroom where she finally relented and fed her baby while another woman urinated in a stall. “I sat on the floor and I cried and I apologized to my
son,” she said. “I told him he would never, ever eat in a bathroom again.” Alberta Justice spokesperson Brendan Cox told Metro the sheriff involved had been “spoken to” and information had been issued to all courthouse sheriffs “to remind them that breastfeeding is an integral part of being a mother.” Jodine Chase with the Breastfeeding Action Committee of Edmonton said her organization tracks about a dozen complaints a year from women who encounter “discrimination or harassment when they’re breastfeeding in public.” “But I suspect it happens more often than that,” she added. “And when it does happen, those women are sometimes really made to feel ashamed.” ROBSON FLETCHER/METRO
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