Tag: pumping

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Summer Travel, Breastfeeding, and the PUMP Act: What Nursing Parents Need to Know

Summer is a season of family vacations, road trips, beach days, and travel adventures. For breastfeeding parents returning to work after the birth of a baby, summer can also bring unique challenges as they balance maintaining their milk supply while navigating airports, hotels, conference centers, and temporary work assignments.

Fortunately, recent federal protections have made it easier for many breastfeeding employees to continue providing human milk for their babies. The Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers (PUMP) Act expanded workplace protections for lactating employees and has important implications for working parents who travel during the summer months.

What Is the PUMP Act?

The PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, commonly known as the PUMP Act, was signed into law in December 2022. The law expanded existing federal protections for breastfeeding employees by requiring most employers to provide:

  • Reasonable break time to express milk during the workday
  • A private space that is shielded from view and free from intrusion
  • Protection for millions of workers who were previously excluded from federal lactation accommodation laws
  • The ability for employees to seek legal remedies if employers fail to comply

Before the PUMP Act, many salaried workers had protections under the Affordable Care Act, but millions of employees—including teachers, nurses, agricultural workers, transportation workers, and many others—were not fully covered. The PUMP Act significantly broadened coverage, helping more families meet their breastfeeding goals.

Why Summer Travel Can Be Challenging

Maintaining lactation while traveling presents logistical hurdles even for experienced breastfeeding parents. Common concerns include:

Changes in Routine

Breastfeeding and milk production often thrive on consistency. Travel may disrupt normal feeding schedules, pumping sessions, sleep patterns, and meal times.

Long Flights and Layovers

Air travel can mean extended periods away from a comfortable pumping space. Delayed flights, crowded terminals, and unpredictable schedules may make it difficult to pump as frequently as needed.

Conferences and Business Travel

Many parents travel for work during the summer months. Conferences, training sessions, and off-site meetings can create challenges when finding appropriate times and locations for milk expression.

Hydration and Heat

Summer temperatures can increase fluid needs and contribute to fatigue. While hydration does not directly increase milk production beyond normal physiological needs, adequate fluid intake helps support overall maternal health and comfort.

How the PUMP Act Helps Traveling Employees

One of the most important aspects of the PUMP Act is that workplace lactation protections do not disappear simply because an employee is traveling for work.

If an employee is attending a conference, working at a temporary site, or participating in employer-sponsored travel, the employer generally remains responsible for providing reasonable break time and an appropriate pumping space.

This means that employers should make reasonable efforts to ensure nursing employees have access to:

  • Private lactation spaces at conference venues
  • Appropriate break schedules
  • Time to express milk during long meetings
  • Accommodations during work-related travel

Many conference centers, airports, and convention facilities now offer dedicated lactation rooms, reflecting growing recognition of breastfeeding families’ needs.

Here is a link to an article that can help mothers find these pumping pods at airports.

Air Travel and Breast Milk

Parents often worry about flying with expressed milk. The good news is that breast milk, infant formula, and feeding supplies receive special consideration through airport security procedures.

When traveling:

  • Inform security officers that you are carrying breast milk.
  • Breast milk may be transported in quantities greater than standard liquid limits.
  • Ice packs, freezer packs, and gel packs used to cool milk are generally permitted.
  • Review current transportation guidelines before travel, as procedures can change.

Many airports now provide lactation pods or nursing suites that offer private spaces for pumping or breastfeeding.

Tips for Protecting Your Milk Supply While Traveling

Plan Ahead

Before traveling, identify:

  • Airport lactation rooms
  • Hotel refrigeration options
  • Conference lactation facilities
  • Nearby locations where pumping can occur if needed

Maintain Your Pumping Schedule

Milk production operates on supply and demand. Attempting to maintain a schedule similar to your normal routine can help prevent discomfort and protect milk production.

Pack Extra Supplies

Consider bringing:

  • Extra pump parts
  • Additional milk storage bags
  • Cleaning supplies
  • Portable battery packs
  • Backup manual pumps

Unexpected travel delays are common during summer vacation season.

Learn to Hand Express (if you don’t already know)

This is another great reason to be sure you know how to hand express your milk. You can find information on hand expressing here.

Hand expression has no parts to pack and can be an easier way to maintain your expression schedule while traveling.

Know Your Rights

Employees should familiarize themselves with workplace lactation protections before traveling. Having a conversation with supervisors or human resources departments ahead of time can prevent misunderstandings and ensure appropriate accommodations are available.

Breastfeeding-Friendly Travel Benefits Everyone

Supporting breastfeeding employees is not simply a legal obligation—it is also good for families and workplaces. Research consistently demonstrates that breastfeeding is associated with improved maternal and infant health outcomes. When employees receive adequate lactation support, they often experience greater job satisfaction and are more likely to remain in the workforce.

The PUMP Act represents an important step toward recognizing that breastfeeding and employment can coexist successfully. As more workplaces, airports, hotels, and conference centers adopt lactation-friendly practices, traveling while breastfeeding becomes increasingly manageable.

Looking Ahead

Summer travel should be an opportunity for connection, professional growth, and family memories—not a source of anxiety about maintaining milk production. The protections established by the PUMP Act help ensure that nursing parents do not have to choose between their careers and their breastfeeding goals.

Whether you’re heading to a family reunion, attending a professional conference, or embarking on a summer vacation, preparation, knowledge of your rights, and access to supportive accommodations can help make the journey smoother.

Breastfeeding parents deserve the time, space, and support necessary to continue providing human milk for their babies and to continue their journies along the Milky Way—at home, at work, and wherever summer adventures may lead.

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Celebrating Pride

This summer, we are revisiting some of our previous publications as they relate to various national celebrations.  June is Pride Month, so this week we are elevating Glenis Decuir’s beautiful story about co-breastfeeding with her wife for  two-and-a-half years. This piece was originally published in 2022.

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The lactation care provider glanced at her breasts and claimed, “You’re not going to be able to produce much milk.” Glenis Decuir, CBS, a young mother at the time, had just given birth to her first baby (now 17 years old), and while she intended to breastfeed her daughter, without explanation, without proper consultation and counseling, without a shred of compassion, the lactation consultant disparaged her intentions so tragically that Decuir not only did not breastfeed her daughter, she remained discouraged through the birth of her second child (now 14 years old) and did not breastfeed him either.

Decuir eventually learned that she has Insufficient Glandular Tissue (IGT) disorder.

“I knew my breasts looked different, but my mom’s looked the same as mine; I didn’t think anything was abnormal,” Decuir explains. “ I was young and wasn’t resourceful; no one explained anything.”

Though Decuir’s introduction to infant feeding was shrouded in the unknown and total neglect from care providers, her story takes a turn, epitomizing self-determination, advocacy and education, perseverance, resilience and empowerment.

In 2018, Decuir’s wife became pregnant with their third child. Because she would not grow and birth this baby, Decuir wondered how she would form a bond with him.

“It was very difficult for me to wrap my head around that,” Decuir shares.

Plunging into self-guided research, Decuir landed on the potential to induce lactation.

When she decided to embark on this path, Decuir reached out for guidance, but found herself in a void.

“Unfortunately, I received the most pushback from doctors, many of whom didn’t even know that inducing lactation was possible,” Decuir documents her road to co-breastfeeding. “I had to see four different doctors before I could find one willing to work with me. Being under the doctor’s care was very important because I had never done this before, and I knew I would be taking medications. After exploring several options, we chose the Newman Goldfarb Protocol as our method of induced lactation.”

For well over 20 weeks, Decuir delved into the protocol.

“Because I had really poor experiences with my first two and poor experiences with seeking help with breastfeeding professionals… I became an advocate… I had overcome so much adversity,” Decuir begins.

Laws state that we can pump anywhere, Decuir continues. And that’s what she did.

“I was pumping in every location imaginable! At my desk, in the car, the movie theater, Six Flags, and much more!” she writes.

Decuir goes on, “I decided to be very public about my entire journey on Instagram. One, I have the right to and I exercise every right, but it also opened a gateway to educating others.”

Prior to inducing lactation, Decuir reports that her children had never been exposed to anyone breastfeeding, “not even at a playground or anything,” she elucidates.

“This is how behind closed doors moms are with breastfeeding,” she says.

But Decuir and her wife’s approach is different; they are open-books with their children, she explains.

“They were old enough to understand scientifically, biologically, physically what my body was going to go through,” Decuir starts. “I educated them through a scientific standpoint, but also talked about normalizing breastfeeding. We talked about my daughter breastfeeding in the future, and my son and his role as a man in a household and how he can support his future wife to breastfeed.”

Decuir recalls the emotional and practical support her older children offered: “I cried in front of them, I pumped in front of them, I laughed in front of them; they helped wash bottles and Spectra parts…”

In sharing her journey with others though, Decuir wasn’t always met with such maturity and acceptance.

“I got everything under the sun,” Decuir remembers. Some told her it was disgusting, some found it weird, and some even went as far as to claim it child abuse.

Orion was born on September 2, 2018. At the time of his birth, Decuir was producing 16 ounces a day– quite close to what is considered full production– and had stored over 1,000 of her milk in a deep freezer.

Decuir says that she didn’t set forth focusing on the quantity though. “I wasn’t thinking about achieving full supply; I was thinking about producing anything. Even if it was only five ounces a day, I thought, I can at least do one feeding a day and that to me was worth it on its own.”

She continues: “Every time that I would latch Orion on, I just thanked Mother Nature and how amazing our bodies are. Maybe if I had birthed Orion, if I  had just latched him on, it wouldn’t have been a second thought, but because of what I went through–I worked real, real hard– every time I was able to latch my son, I literally thanked the universe. I was so grateful.”

Decuir and her wife went on to co-breastfeed Orion until he was two-and-a-half.

Throughout her breastfeeding relationship, Decuir remained visible in her efforts. “Having the power to go through that experience breastfeeding anywhere and everywhere in public, it became almost liberating and very freeing to be able to exercise my right, and in doing so I came across a lot of people. I took them as opportunities to talk more about breastfeeding and breastfeeding in public.”

At the start of her journey, in order to create her village, Decuir started a private Facebook support group. Today it has over two and a half thousand members.

Locally, Decuir serves as a breastfeeding support person through ZipMilk and is a ROSE Community Transformer, all on a volunteer basis. She has presented at the ROSE Summit in years’ past and is currently working on a book.

You can read Decuir’s former publications about her co-breastfeeding journey here and here .

More for Pride Month 

It’s Pride Month! Working to close the gaps in LGBTQ+ Care

Skin to skin image goes viral

Exploring language among gender nonconforming individuals and nontraditional partners

On Becoming Transliterate: An Interview with Diana West, BA, IBCLC

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Where are they now? Catching up with Lucy Ellen Towbin, LCSW

Towbin admires her grandchild in this recent photo.

Many of Lucy Ellen Towbin’s, LCSW endeavors are defined by nourishment. By the time she was two, Towbin was producing art and as she has continued to make multimedia art into her 70s, she nourishes her Self. As the eldest of four children, Towbin helped provide for her
younger siblings in their childhood. In her 30s, as a new mother,  she nourished her children.  As a social worker and lactation care provider, she supported other dyads in their infant feeding efforts. Later, Towbin started a business (which has since been sold) that offers clean, dehydrated parrot pellets, so that she and other parrot-owners could escape reliance on industry-produced pet food which usually contains additives and food coloring that parrots are particularly sensitive to.

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Towbin retired from the
Arkansas Health Department, and while she no longer holds her IBCLC
credential, she continues to assist new mothers informally. Towbin now
practices as a part-time therapist for a psychotherapy clinic in
Arkansas.

The last time Towbin graced Our Milky Way was back in 2017 when we
featured the breastfeeding art contest she facilitated through the
Arkansas Breastfeeding Coalition.

We’re pleased to have chatted with Towbin as part of our Where are they
now? series. Responses have been edited for brevity.

 

Towbin poses with Ruth Lawrence roughly a decade ago.

How did you become interested in maternal child health? 

The first job I had at the Department of Health was as the refugee health program coordinator. We worked with mostly refugees from Southeast Asia.  I was really interested in and intrigued  by the difference in how
they were taking care of their children. They slept with their babies, which I’m sure plenty of people in the U.S. still did quietly, but back then, no one was talking about it.
During a panel discussion we once held, a speaker from Laos shared
that his six children born in Laos were breastfed, and the five children
born in the States were bottle-fed. This is when I really became
interested in the cultural aspects that affect infant feeding, and I started
to try to figure out what was going on.

Is there a current trend, project or organization that excites you?

I’m really not that up-to-date about trends in lactation, but what does
excite me are the portable pumps that working moms can wear. A close
friend of my daughter’s is a nurse practitioner and she showed me her
pump that she wears under her white jacket as she walks around seeing
patients. It makes almost no noise and it’s amazing because you don’t
even know that it’s under there. That would’ve been so incredible for me
to have as a working breastfeeding mom.

When I was working outside of the home, it was really difficult; even La
Leche League wasn’t very supportive of working moms at the time. With
my first child, I had a manual pump and my own office, but the pump was
miserable.  It hurt and wasn’t that effective. With my second child, I
stayed home longer with him and then he wouldn’t take a bottle, so I
didn’t do that much pumping. When I went back to work, my mother took
care of him and she lived close to where I was working, so I would nurse
him before work, and then drive back and forth to her house to feed him
about every two hours. It was a lot of back and forth.

What is the most significant change you’ve noticed within maternal child
health?

I have a very small sample size to talk about significant changes. All I
know is from my daughter and her friends. I’ve noticed that there seems
to be less unmedicated births happening in the hospital. I know there are
still a lot of people choosing home birth. But of those having babies in
the hospital, I haven’t heard about anyone doing what I did and having
mine in the hospital, but with no pain medicine or IV or anything.   I was
lucky to find the physicians that I did who went along with my wishes.  I
would expect there would be more supportive physicians now and instead, I don’t hear about any. I do want to reiterate that my observations are based on just a small group.

What is your best piece of advice for the next generation of lactation
care providers?

The most helpful lesson combines my training as both a therapist and
lactation consultant. New mothers need so much emotional support.
They don’t need people to take care of the baby. Bringing food and running errands for them is helpful. But I think what gets overlooked is
how much they need to be told that they’re going to make it, that they will
survive this early period of no sleep, and not knowing if they are doing a
good job. They need reassurance that this difficult time is normal and
they need to be told they will get through this.

My best piece of advice for the next generation is to take a holistic
approach, don’t just emphasize the physical exam. Equally important is
how much sleep the mother is getting,  what she is eating, if she is
getting exercise, if she has family and friends supporting her, if she has a
plan for if she’s going to be working outside of the home. It’s important to
equip new moms with coping strategies like easy breathing exercises or
something when she is feeling stressed that are doable in short time
frames and at home.

Where do you envision yourself in the next decade?

Asking someone my age where I see myself in the next ten years is
basically just hoping I’m still healthy and active! I do all the right things
and have good genes, so I’m on the pathway to that, but you never
know. Appreciate good health and youthful energy if you still have it.

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A story of lactation and breastfeeding as a ‘Tummy Mummy’

Apryl Yearout, a school psychologist in Washington state, uses her body in powerful ways. For one, Yearout, known as Ariel Pain on the roller derby track, competes as a full contact skater excelling as both a jammer and a blocker.

Used with permission.

Yearout was drawn to roller derby well over a decade ago because of the “incredible community” it offered her.

“I heard ‘I’m proud of you’ and ‘good job’ more than I ever had,” she reflects. “It’s physically demanding and makes you feel strong and capable.”

In another manifestation of her power, Yearout birthed and breastfed her two daughters. Yearout’s eager body produced so much milk that she was also able to donate about 1,000 ounces of milk to local families.

Beyond this, Yearout helped create a family as a gestational carrier, or “tummy mummy” as the intended parents refer to her.

The idea of surrogacy came to her as a few realities collided. She’d anticipated having many more children of her own, but she and her husband divorced when their youngest child was 18 months old. As her children grew and without a new partner, she didn’t feel she was in the position to “start over” again with a baby.

Yearout watched her sister struggle to carry a pregnancy to term for some time, but ultimately, she was able to birth her own baby, so Yearout pursued the services of an agency and matched with a couple in need.

In April 2023, Yearout gave birth to the couple’s son. The baby and her youngest daughter wound up sharing a birth date, fulfilling her daughter’s birthday wish.

As discussed during her pregnancy, Yearout breastfed her surrobaby on occasion, for a few days after the birth while spending time with the new family.

“Overall, it felt like the natural completion of the pregnancy,” she shares. She also predicts it’s why she recovered so well from pregnancy.

Though she and the indented parents had already discussed direct breastfeeding as their plan while possible, Yearout expressed colostrum in the event that the intended parents felt strongly about being the ones to feed their baby first.

Unlike some surrogates, Yearout didn’t struggle with the idea that breastfeeding would create an unhealthy bond with the surrobabe.

She shares: “I was already very connected to this baby. I approached the surrogacy with a mindset that I need to make sure I have the right couple, I need to fall in love with them becasue I know I’m going to fall in love with this baby… physically and emotionally…everything is tied up… he’s not mine, I never felt like he was my child but I still love him… For me, not nursing, not having any breastfeeding experiences would have felt a little incomplete. I think it also would have put a physical strain on my body that could have pulled on those emotions and made it harder. I didn’t like the idea of forcing my body to stop [producing milk].”

The intended parents were not interested in managing the shipment of her milk after they returned home, so Yearout sought out a local family to donate to.

“And I get to see that little one grow up,” she says.

Yearout completed pumping and donating her milk in the autumn of 2023.

“Pumping alone is really hard,” she reports. In contrast, Yearout after a workday pumping for her keepers, she would come home to breastfeed through the night, and her body responded to this interaction much differently.

“When I was just pumping, [production] tapered off a lot faster,” she shares.

Thinking back on her experience as a tummy mummy, Yearout articulates her discomfort with the perception that gestational carriers are compelled solely by financial compensation.

She says in a somewhat joking manner, “I feel like I could sell pictures of my feet for more money.” (Let us note that this is not to diminish the financial burden that surrogacy can cause for many couples looking to create a family.)

“The thing that always bothered me was that people assumed that I did this for the money,” she goes on. “I had other motivations. [The arrangement]  helped me take my kids on a trip we would have never gone on before, but it wasn’t my reason…Money wasn’t a primary motivator but it did come up so often [with others].”

Instead, Yearout sought and found connection.

She comments, “This is what my body is good at and I’m going to use it to benefit other people.”

Yearout and her mom recorded an interview with StoryCorps. Unrelated to surrogacy, it’s a conversation about Native American roots, racism, white privilege, and their relationships with their extended family, and it’s worth a listen. You can find it here.

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Infusing work-life balance in medicine: reflections from Katrina B. Mitchell, MD, IBCLC, PMH-C, FACS

— “…Breastfeeding isn’t about ‘success’ or ‘goals’ — it’s a human experience.” —
Mitchell’s son captures her on the job. Used with permission: https://www.instagram.com/p/CuN_G35Rc0h/

Katrina B. Mitchell, MD, IBCLC, PMH-C, FACS, a breast surgeon, lactation consultant, and perinatal mental health provider in Santa Barbara, Cali., went back to work at five weeks postpartum.

“Looking back…I have no idea how I did this,” she reflects.  “I know this is still far better than migrant workers on the central coast of California, who may not even have a week to recover.”

In part, Dr. Mitchell recognizes the support she received from a pediatrician; he counseled her on bed sharing during the time she was breastfeeding as a single parent in surgical training.

“This literally saved mine and my son’s physical and emotional health (as well as allowed me to exclusively breastfeed for six months and then onward for years),” Dr. Mitchell explains. “Sure, it was still terrible to have to pump milk in a bathroom by the OR and lug my pump all over the hospital, but I really believe I stayed on a postpartum high because I got to sleep and nurse my baby at night when I got home.”

She continues: “[Bedsharing] saved every possible complication we could have experienced with me being back at work operating 14 plus hours a day at that point in time…. I am forever grateful to this pediatrician…”

Dr. Mitchell captured these early experiences in a book she wrote for her son about being a surgeon mom.

In her practice today, Dr. Mitchell tells her patients who are going back to work that the ounces in a bottle during the day are not nearly as important as feeding baby at the breast when the dyad is together and feeding overnight on cue.

“Safe bedsharing is what facilitates this and results in continuation of breastfeeding far longer than separate surface bedsharing, sleep training, and feeding a pump rather than the baby,” she explains.

In particular, physicians have long struggled with “pouring from an empty cup” alongside being influenced by insidious industry tactics, mechanical culture and inadequate education. Nikki Lee and I wrote about these forces in Physicians as parents: How can one pour from an empty cup? and Physicians as breastfeeding supporters.

In New study calls for greater access, equity for breastfeeding surgeons author Hilary Brown reports on “A new vanguard of physicians… determined to make the field more hospitable to working mothers by establishing dedicated pumping spaces and allotting time for pumping without fear of retribution or punishment.”

Brown goes on, “… No one should be denied professional opportunities just for choosing to have a work-life balance. For too long, surgeons were lauded for not having families, or prioritizing their work over a personal life. To be a martyr to the field was considered the highest level of dedication. But ultimately, such devotion has proven to be a detriment. Excellent patient care, London-Bounds says, starts with self-care.”

Dr. Mitchell acknowledges that “..the surgical world is becoming more attune to this topic.”

In 2020, the Association of Women in Surgery released a position statement on supporting physicians and trainees who are breastfeeding.

In regard to lactation accommodations in the workplace though, Dr. Mitchell says she often thinks of something Kimberly Seals Allers pointed out many years ago when she said something along the lines of: “We are a pump nation — we shouldn’t be celebrating being gifted a pump from our medical insurance.  We should be demanding adequate paid maternity leave.”

“Accommodations should really be focusing on this governmental-level change,” Dr. Mitchell elucidates.  “Not only is it the right thing to do for human beings, but it reflects one of the fundamental principles of economics 101:  opportunity cost.  You lose some productivity up front by giving mom a longer maternity leave, but you exponentially recoup this cost when moms breastfeed rather than wean and have good mental and physical health when they return to work.”

In this landscape without paid leave, there can be a layer of tension that brews between colleagues.

“A  lot of the hostility towards lactation and lactating patients does stem from physician personal experience with lactation (which was unfortunately largely negative in the past, and can persist today no matter what accommodations we provide),” Dr. Mitchell begins.

“And these negative experiences are a direct result of the medical patriarchy, which provides little to no education on the breast and lactation in medical school, residency, or fellowship training.  Because of this, just like all other patients, physicians themselves are at risk for not receiving appropriate evidence-based support and education surrounding lactation and breastfeeding.”

She continues, “As we all know, the postpartum time period is one of great vulnerability, and a person’s experience with breastfeeding can play a central role in how they navigate early motherhood.”

Juxtaposing the way that we look at lactation and breast cancer care, Dr. Mitchell says that we would never tolerate breast cancer care as being reflective of personal experience, but this often happens with lactation.

“With breastfeeding, there’s the dismissive comments of ‘oh, it didn’t work for me, so it’s fine it doesn’t work for you.’  We would never say ‘that chemotherapy didn’t work for me, so it’s ok if it doesn’t work for you,’” she explains.

Clear to recognize that this is not the fault of the individual, Dr. Mitchell says it’s instead a reaction to “the fact that the patriarchy didn’t support them, either.”

And so, to influence real change, we have to start at a systems level in medical education, she says.

Training needs to include education about things like safe bedsharing, how formula feeding and breastfeeding are vastly different in terms of volume and infant behavior (e.g. the normal distraction of a breastfed infant at four months old versus a bottle fed infant taking a bottle on schedule), Dr. Mitchell explains.

“…This should be standard education for all of us.”

Physicians from less traditional backgrounds have great power to drive change too, Dr. Mitchell suggests, sharing her personal experience:  “I am the only person in my generation on one side of my family to go to college, much less medical school.  Three quarters of medical school matriculants come from the top two household-income quintiles — I was not one of them.  Since I was a teenager, I worked my way through school.  I had a liberal arts background and undergraduate degree, and I think all of this made me see things from a different perspective than other medical students and physicians.  I was also lucky that my mom pushed back against the tide of formula feeding in the late 1970s, and I was a breastfeed infant myself because of this.”

In a powerful Instagram post, a photo snapped by her seven-year-old son is captioned “I love this moment because it’s the ultimate rebellion against corporate medicine. No one can take away the power of human connection.”

The post is commentary on a simpler, more connected way of caring for patients.

“Instead of a patient having to login to the EMR or deal with a centralized scheduling call center to make an appointment, [the post] reflected the way we used to care for people in medicine and what I try to preserve as much as possible:  a patient needing help, contacting me directly on a weekend, us all going in with casual clothes and me just doing my job as a doctor,” Dr. Mitchell explains. “ No electronic medical record, no ‘15 minutes with each patient’ corporate mandates, no ‘you can’t do this or that’ by the administration.”

Ironically, Dr. Mitchell continues, she’s noticed that corporate medicine has made certain aspects of lactation accommodations better.

“The one positive aspect …is oversight and standardization and human resource departments,” she says.   “If there’s a law for accommodations, there is someone enforcing them (along with all the other not-so-helpful ‘enforcements’ like clicking through countless screens in the EMR simply to write a quick note on a patient).”

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Mitchell created the Physician Guide to Breastfeeding, a hub where she’s committed to sharing openly and advocating for improvements in broader maternal child health education. You can explore her collection here.

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