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This is a photograph of me nursing Duncan during a break in the graduation ceremonies when I received my PhD. I know something about school and I know something about nursing, so 
recent newsmedia coverage of the Harvard medical student who asked for extra time on her licensure examination caught my eye. The student, Sophie Currier, has a blog on which she makes her case and where many of her colleagues have attacked her. Is Sophie a whiner or a winner?
AP coverage initially made the case sound open and shut. Currier has to take a 9 hour exam and asked for extra time in order to pump breast milk for her 4 month old baby. The exam board turned her down. The judge rejected her request saying,
“The plaintiff may take the test and pass, notwithstanding what she considers to be unfavorable conditions. The plaintiff may delay the test, which is offered numerous times during the year, until she has finished her breast-feeding and the need to express milk.”
When I first read this I was appalled. What was that judge thinking? Unfavorable conditions? As a person who struggles with engorgement, clogged ducts and mastitis, I don’t believe that having insufficient time to pump is merely an “unfavorable condition.” It is a very big deal. Breastfeeding mothers can’t simply skip a day. I imagine there’s considerable individual variation, but at times I have had trouble just skipping 4 hours! And, supposing we forget pain and suffering, what about the importance of sustaining the milk supply? Not nursing for an extended period is not a good idea. The result is a precipitous drop in your milk supply. This is a problem that is hard to fix because when your milk supply drops, your baby still needs milk. If you feed the baby artificial baby milk or previously pumped milk, you miss the stimulation your body needs to trigger an increase in milk production.
I did not like the judge’s phrase “[when] she has finished her breast-feeding.” 1) Calling it “her breast-feeding” makes is sound as though it is merely a lifestyle choice, as if this is about what color of hair to have. But breastfeeding isn’t some kind of feel good/I’m in touch with nature thing (or at least not only), it is about the health of mother and baby. See my other post here.
2) When did the judge think she would be “finished”? Sure, plenty of women in the U.S. only breastfeed for a few weeks or months. But breastfeeding much longer is better for the mother and the baby. The World Health Organization recommends nursing to age 2. Granted, the urgency of pumping would drop off before the baby turned two. However, if our society is going to welcome women into the workforce, it is a mistake to encourage women to see progress in their careers as balanced against the opportunity to nurse their children. Ultimately, fewer women will nurse and they will nurse for shorter periods. And other women who would have been assets in the workforce will opt out in favor of their children.
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4 Responses to “Should a Nursing Mother Get Extra Time?”
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Shame on her for using the system in this way. Hundreds of nursing mothers takes exams every year. They manage to store milk ahead of time so they do not have to actually breast feed that day and then use break time if they need to express. She is a whiner beyond belief. I have breast feed 2 children through school, work, ballgames, trips etc. She is full of it. And it amazes me as the mother of an ADD child the accommodations she has received at school. Her disability is SO amazing and more difficult then anyone else’s it astounds me! I hope MY child is accomodated when he heads to college in a year to the extant she has been.
She should be a lawyer not a doctor she is so good at using the system in way no one else has ever thought of. But wait, I married a lawyer and he is not a whiner so that is an insult to him. She has a good deal going and is going to milk it to the end so to speak. But shame shame shame.
And pity the company that hires her because how can she POSSIBLY do research or work if she cannot concentrate, cannot read, cannot organize, needs extra time, cannot remember things, has babies to breast feed etc. She has given out interviews everywhere about her ADHD and other disabilities and I don’t know how she even gets through the day! Good luck with that.
Readers: Note that “Gabe” didn’t address a single point I made in my post. To me it looks as though this is someone who has simply typed “Sophie Currier” into a search engine and typed up anti-Sophie vitriol in every available forum. What would motivate someone to do that?
I do consider other sides of this issue in my follow-up posts. It would be nice to have a dialogue rather than a shouting match.
I worked 10 hour days while nursing my son and, try as hard as I did, I could only keep the supply up for a few months. He is now seven months and I hate giving him formula, but the breaks and lunches I received (I pumped about every four hours) were not often enough to express the milk that was needed and to keep up my supply. I was very confused because my son only fed about every four hours, but I found out later that babies are so much more effective at removing milk from the breast than a pump that it can sometimes take two to four sessions of pumping to produce the amount of milk a baby normally would in one session. Especially if the woman has a good supply, you can’t expect a woman to go for nine hours without pumping milk without becoming incredibly painfully engorged and, on the flip side, if her supply is not that great she needs to pump more often to maintain it. It’s also interesting to note that the only place in the U.S. that it’s illegal to breastfeed is in a moving car, and even then it’s only because the child must be in a car seat. On Federal property, such as capital buildings and in courthouses, you can’t be arrested for indecent exposure while breastfeeding. I don’t see how it’s a just or legal ruling the judge made.
[...] I never made it all the way to comfort with breastfeeding whenever and wherever I went. Although I did breastfeed in public many times, I also spent a lot of time nursing in more private spots because it was [...]