The war on mothers who breast-feed in public continues across the country, embarrassing the women who do so.
A Washington, D.C., mother was recently charged with indecent exposure after she was caught breast-feeding her 4-month-old in the hallway of a government building.
The mother, Simone Dos Santos, who is also a lawyer, was waiting on a traffic hearing when she stepped out in the hallway to breast-feed her child. Santos was covering herself with a jacket when two guards approached her and told her she had to stop.
"I was shocked, upset and angry that by providing food for my son, I was being treated like a criminal," she wrote in a blog post for the Washington Post.
The guard came up to Santos and said: "Well, this is a government building, and you can't breast-feed in a public corridor of a government building!"
That guard, however, was wrong. A 2007 amendment to the D.C. Human Rights Act gives mothers the right to nurse their children anywhere in public or private.
"We as nursing women have rights. It's a natural, legally protected process, and people need to understand that," Santos told ABC7.
The division that hires the contractors who hire security officers in the building disagreed with Santos' account. "At no time was the mother prohibited from nursing," spokesman Darrell Pressley told ABC7.
Read more at the Washington Post.