Breast-Feeding Should Be Encouraged, Not Outlawed : This failure to protect nursing mothers displays legislative cowardice and hypocrisy. Real decency should prevail.

In Midway City, 24-year-old Mary Wood went into labor with her second child. Her husband couldn’t get the car started and the pains increased so rapidly that she panicked. Her husband hailed a passing black-and-white whose officers quickly sized up the situation and put her in their car to rush her to a Fountain Valley hospital. Before they had gone four blocks, the head crowned and the police wisely stopped. Aided by an officer, she delivered at curbside in the back seat of the patrol car. Most of the neighbors cheered the new arrival. One apparently did not, for the next day, Mary was served in the hospital with a warrant for arrest for indecent exposure, and the baby put on probation by the Department of Social Services; her husband was arrested for child endangerment and the cop was suspended.

A fictional scenario? Yes, but no less outrageous than the actions of a pusillanimous California Assembly committee that recently killed a bill reinforcing the right of California mothers to breast-feed their infants in public spaces and protecting them from harassment.

Medical authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, laud breast-feeding as the optimal nourishment for the newborn, benefiting both mother and child. Where it is socioeconomically possible, more than half of new moms choose to sustain their newborns in this exemplary fashion.

If infants had time clocks we could perhaps arrange in advance to nurse them in private accommodations. But unless mother and child are to be imprisoned in the home for the three to 12 months during which nursing is desirable, it is likely that the mother will be forced either to endure the hunger shrieks of her infant or more properly to feed it wherever she is. Often it is not possible for the mother to repair to the privacy of a restroom, and in any event, it would seem to be far more sanitary to nurse a baby on a mall bench or on the lawn of a public park than amid the E. coli and other microbes of a public lavatory.

For the emotionally balanced there is absolutely nothing lewd or lascivious in the act of nursing. Still, in our prudish society, most mothers catering to the child in a public place cover themselves far more modestly than the accepted dress code on any public beach.

Compared to European standards, we are Victorian.

One of our enlightened lawgivers hastened to explain that he was not against motherhood and childbearing (how noble) but that “there are other body functions that are natural but not necessarily decent at a particular time.” Has he never been surprised while changing a baby? Adults may be able to control their natural body functions to confirm to social mores but babies must wear diapers.

Another puritanical assemblyman supported his negative vote by expressing fear that the bill “might empower people to get naked and breast-feed in the middle of a mall.”

Get real! Some people do disrobe in public, but as emergency doctors who do see demented unfortunates enter or be brought to their departments in various stage of undress will testify, it is alcohol and other drugs, not milk, that provokes this aberrance.

All of this might simply be an exercise in frivolity if it were not for statistics that suggest that it is the nascent fear of embarrassment that causes the 50% of women who nurse their babies immediately after birth down to 20% at six months postpartum.

One would hope that this dismal display of legislative cowardice and hypocrisy is ignored by the public, the police and magistrates until common sense prevails.