Stephanie carefully slipped off one strap of her bathing suit and began to nurse her son Roman, which is where the trouble began. “A lady approached me and told me that I needed to cover up because her sons were swimming,” Stephanie says.
The other pool patron left before Stephanie could respond to her request. “I was really shocked because I’ve never had anybody approach me before while breastfeeding,” she says. “And so we ignored her and I kept feeding my baby.”
“We went about swimming, unbeknownst to us there was an issue, apparently, continuing,” she says. The group had decided to cut the day short because Stephanie’s husband, who had joined them at the pool earlier, needed to head out to go to work. “As we were getting the kids out of the pool and ready to go, a police officer approached me, which was just — we were just in awe,” Stephanie says.
The officer told Stephanie that there had been a complaint made against her for breastfeeding at the pool and that he was there to ask her to leave the premises. Stephanie told the officer that Minnesota state law says that she could feed her baby anywhere, “and he said, ‘You are correct, but the establishment reserves the right to ask you to leave if you’re not going to be more discreet.”
“He made sure to reiterate a couple of times that they were going to ask us to leave,” Stephanie adds.
CafeMom reached out to both the Mora Aquatic Center and Kanabec County Sheriff’s Office for a comment.
Speaking with CafeMom, Stephanie tells us that the Mora Aquatic Center had been her local pool her whole life. “I grew up in Mora, I graduated from Mora, my parents graduated from Mora.” But in her Facebook post she says that “Mora Aquatic Center lost my business forever, today.”
The plan was to gather as many breastfeeding moms to sit outside of the Mora Aquatic Center while breastfeeding their own children.
The press release explained that “our staff politely asked them to be more discrete or relocate to another area at the MAC. When they did not, it created an untenable situation and our public safety team was brought in to assist the MAC staff.” But interestingly, the letter asserts that “neither women were asked to leave the facility.”
“We apologize to Ms. Ellingson-Buchanan and Ms. Davis if they were offended by how they were treated,” the letter ends. “Although we cannot anticipate all possible scenarios, City policies and procedures will be reviewed and revised as deemed necessary.”
In the end, Stephanie still finds the backlash for breastfeeding confusing. “To me it’s a natural thing. To feel shame over that or humiliated, I don’t really know why people feel the need to do that,” she adds.
The activist mom is now planning a second nurse-in on August 11.
