How Airports Are Trying to Become Breastfeeding-Friendly

Babies wail, throw up, and poop anywhere—they don’t care if you’re on a crowded bus, or an airplane experiencing lurching turbulence, or an express subway car hurtling past dozens of blocks. And when they’re hungry, they’re hungry. Right now. Hunger, at least, seems relatively easy to pacify: Just feed them. But for nursing moms, that’s not always an easy task.

Breastfeeding or pumping on the go can be accompanied by a litany of obstacles, from public reactions (Is anyone going to hassle me?) to logistics (Where do I sit? Is there a spot to plug in my breast pump?) to the headache of navigating regulations dictating accommodation for nursing mothers that are neither universally understood nor uniformly enforced. Airports can prove especially tricky.