Nursing Your Kids

Note: This article has been edited to correct a previously published version.

A breastfeeding brouhaha has broken out at a York Region swimming facility.

At one end of Newmarket’s AquaCenter Swim School pool is Cinira Longuinho, who wants Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal to investigate why she was asked to leave the water Oct. 24 while breastfeeding her 20-month-old daughter Camilla on the pool steps.

At the other end – and drowning in a sea of blogs, emails and protests – is pregnant AquaCenter owner Ellie Karkouti. She hired four security guards, not expecting them to show up in bulletproof vests, when Longuinho and her supporters threatened a “peaceful nursing protest” last Friday.

In between are a whole bunch of people who are quietly wondering why breastfeeding still causes such a flood of emotions and how things got so out of control, right in the midst of York Region’s “Anytime, Anywhere” breastfeeding campaign.

“I believe in breastfeeding, just not in the pool,” says pool owner Karkouti, 39, who is 17 weeks pregnant with her first child. “I gave her two options. I said I have comfortable chairs in the change room or the viewing gallery.”

According to Karkouti, while salt and chlorine reduce dangerous bacteria in a pool, the water’s still “filled with stuff that you can’t kill – people’s pee and sweat and body stuff is in there. Am I ever going to stick my baby’s mouth on a breast that’s been in a pool without cleaning it (first)? Never, ever.”

Longuinho, 32, was chatting with a bunch of mothers and kids during their weekly, hour-long swim session at AquaCenter when her daughter became cranky. Rather than climb out of the warm water onto the cool deck, out of range of her friends, Longuinho started nursing Camilla on the stairs, with her breasts above water.

She claims Karkouti came up to her a few minutes later and gave her one option: the change room. “I didn’t know what to do,” says Longuinho. “I was embarrassed. In reality, I wanted to pretend that nothing had happened.”

So she spent the last few minutes swimming with her daughter, then fed her in the change room and, later, her car, where she started to realize: “What happened was wrong. I knew that, based on the law, I had the right to breastfeed in a public place.”

Longuinho, who emigrated from Brazil four years ago, says English isn’t her first language and blames that, in part, for what happened next.

When friends expressed outrage – and her daughter’s former pediatrician stressed there should be “no qualification” on where a mother feeds her child – Longuinho urged them to join her in a “peaceful protest for breastfeeding” at the AquaCenter last Friday. She says she simply intended to feed her child in the pool. But then details of the “protest” hit breastfeeding sites and blogs – and Karkouti’s email inbox. Fearing that dozens of angry lactivists might show up at her pool, Karkouti contacted York Regional Police.

When it became clear they had no intention of sending uniformed officers, she says, Karkouti hired $400 worth of her own protection – four security guards who kept the 20 or so protesters, many of them children, at bay.

“I guess that’s what they come with,” Karkouti said yesterday of the Kevlar-clad guards. “I didn’t even notice. All I thought was, `If I have 400 people trying to force their way in, what am I supposed to do?’”

Says Longuinho: “We weren’t carrying signs or anything. The idea was to go and talk to her (Karkouti) and nurse in the pool. One of the guards even had handcuffs. I believe it was to intimidate us.”

Karkouti was so concerned the protest might foul the water, forcing a costly cleanup or shutdown, she refused to let the group in.

Longuinho is pondering her next move. “What happened was wrong,” she says. “I want to use it as an example for other mothers that they should not be afraid of breastfeeding, even in a pool.”

It’s far from the first time a lactating mother has been kicked out of a pool. After a number of “breastfeeding incidents” at municipal pools (this pool is privately owned), the Breastfeeding Action Committee of Edmonton urged governments to uniformly adopt breastfeeding-friendly regulations, saying there is no evidence the practice is unsafe for babies, their mothers or others in the pool.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission says breastfeeding women can’t be prohibited from feeding their babies in public, or ordered to move to areas considered more “discreet.” But the Ministry of Health sets rules that ban food and drink around pools, says Karkouti, and if breastfeeding is allowed, bottles should also be allowed.