- Pizza shop worker takes smoke break, saves 7-year-old boy
- Crazy video: Man drags shark back into water at North Carolina beach
- Baby's reaction after trying on first pair of glasses will melt your heart
- Strangers slammed her boyfriend's body image; she shut them down
- Mini ice age could hit Earth by 2030, researchers say
No food or drink is allowed in the water — and that includes a mother breast-feeding her son, a Round Rock pool manager told Cindy Herrine last week.
Herrine, 26, was swimming in the Micki Krebsbach Pool Thursday with her 20-month-old son, Blaze, when he got hungry, she said. So she took a break in the water to breast-feed Blaze, who was wearing a life vest.
“Sometimes it makes him feel more calm and happy to nurse while we are swimming,” Herrine said.
That’s when the trouble started, Herrine said. She said a pool employee told her to stop breast-feeding because someone had complained. “I said, ‘It’s my legal right to breast-feed anywhere I’m allowed to be,’” said Herrine.
She got out of the pool and used her cell phone to pull up the Texas statute that says so and showed it to a pool manager.
Herrine, a stay-at-home mother whose husband works in the software industry, said the woman who had made the complaint apologized to her. But after Herrine got back in the pool and resumed feeding Blaze, she said, the manager came over and told her that he had checked with the police and found out that the pool was allowed to tell her to stop breast-feeding, she said.
“He said, ‘We are allowed to say there is no eating or drinking in the pool.’”
Herrine said she got out of the pool and called the police so she could file a complaint against the pool manager. The two police officers who arrived told her she couldn’t file a harassment charge because the situation didn’t fit the definition of the crime, she said.
Herrine went home frustrated and upset, she said. But she was right about the law, said Austin attorney Eleanor Ruffner, a member of a mentoring program for mothers. A 1995 statute says a mother may breast-feed her baby anywhere she is allowed to be, Ruffner said.
Ruffner said the problem at the Round Rock pool didn’t surprise her. “A lot of people who haven’t spent a lot of time with a nursing parent can be uncomfortable with an exposed breast,” she said.
Rick Atkins, the city’s Parks and Recreation director, called Herrine on Monday and apologized and told her breast-feeding was allowed in the swimming pool, she said.
Atkins told the American-Statesman that the employees at the pool didn’t know about the Texas law. The aquatics staff now understands that breast-feeding is at the mother’s “discretion,” he said.
“If she wants to feed in the pool or on the deck, that’s her prerogative, and we will go for it,” he said.
He said the issue of breast-feeding had never come up before at a Round Rock public pool. “We as a city are in favor of breast-feeding,” he said.
About the Author
