Margie Schrader did it in her office. Kirstin Milks did it in her classroom. Jami Hamman did it in her cubicle. And Jean Bauer did it wherever she could find a lockable door.
“I pumped in bathrooms, closets,” Bauer said.
Bauer started breast-feeding immediately after giving birth to her daughter, Lillian, in 2009. Because she was a nursing student at Ivy Tech, Bauer could only take a month off for maternity leave before returning to school and student clinical work at IU Health Bloomington Hospital.
Every two to three hours of her 12-hour nursing shifts, Bauer needed to find a private space to set up her breast pump, pump enough breast milk to feed her daughter the following day and dismantle and clean her equipment for later use.
“It was frowned upon,” Bauer remembers six years later. “You don’t leave clinic. You’re here to learn and do this full time. You can’t just leave.”
Even as a student, Bauer was experiencing the frustration of many new working moms— making time in their busy 9-to-5 (or longer) schedules to pump breast milk, and often having to explain to employers that taking a break to pump is their right, protected by federal and state law.
Bauer is one of the 70.1 percent of mothers participating in the workforce who have children younger than 18, according to 2014 data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Mothers with young children are less likely to be in the workforce. Last year, the participation rate for mothers with children 6 or younger was just 64.2 percent. For mothers with infants younger than 1, it was 57.1 percent.
Returning to work after giving birth is a major worry for many new moms, said Ann Marie Neeley, an International Board Certified Lactation consultant with St. Vincent Women’s Hospital. Neeley teaches classes on breast-feeding and pumping, and said it can be difficult to focus a lesson on starting to breast-feed successfully when more than half of the women in the room plan to return to their offices in a matter of weeks.
“They’re already jumping ahead in their mind past maternity leave and wanting to know how they’re going to go back to work,” Neeley said.
Some mothers even hesitate about starting to breast-feed when they know they’ll need to pump soon after. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2014 Breastfeeding Report Card showed that 74.1 percent of Hoosier infants born in 2011 had breast-fed at some point, but only 38.6 percent of infants were breast-feeding at 6 months, after many mothers return to their jobs. The national average for breast-feeding at 6 months was 49.4 percent. Even fewer infants in Indiana, 21.5 percent compared with the national average of 26.7 percent, were breast-feeding at 12 months.