Health & Science
Another Kind of Dining Hall
College campuses across the country are establishing lactation rooms where students with babies can breastfeed.
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Krystal Cushing’s crusade to create a lactation room at the University of Oklahoma (OU), in Norman, was inspired by her trips to a campus ladies’ room, where she could overhear the sounds of a woman in a nearby stall pumping breast milk.
“She had nowhere to go but the bathroom,” says Cushing, 26, an OU student who is expecting her first child next month. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, what if I have to pump milk between classes?”
So on behalf of all the moms who study or work at OU, Cushing teamed up with the Women’s Outreach Center to push for a campus lactation room.
The request is still under review, but if the school creates one, OU will join a growing number of colleges that are setting up comfortable and private quarters for students and employees who are nursing mothers.
Though there are no firm statistics on how prevalent they are, “more campuses [are opening up] lactation rooms” for women to breastfeed or to pump milk, said Kathy Lebbing, a spokesperson for the La Leche League, an international breastfeeding advocacy group.
Earlier this year, Columbia University, in New York City, opened a lactation facility equipped with wall outlets for breast pumps and refrigerators for storing milk. Administrators “recognized a need,” said Rosemary Keane, assistant vice president of Columbia Student Services. Although some women may be comfortable breastfeeding in public, few are willing to use a pump anywhere but in a private place, Keane noted.
Larger state universities were on the vanguard of the move to accommodate breastfeeding moms. The University of Iowa, in Iowa City, for example, opened the first of its 20 lactation rooms in 1994. Both the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, also have well-established lactation facilities—and even provide breast pump rentals.
Services for nursing moms at the University of California Berkeley are so extensive that, last year, the school got an award from the California Breastfeeding Coalition, an advocacy group. Trish Ratto, manager of UC Berkeley’s health services, says that lactation rooms are especially necessary on college campuses. “You see a high percentage of women, especially in the educated population, who want to breastfeed,” she said.
The proliferation of campus lactation rooms coincides with a national initiative to encourage nursing, long considered by doctors to offer optimal health benefits to both mom and baby. In a federal goal-setting program, called Healthy People 2010, public health officials aim to get half of all mothers to breastfeed until their child is six months old. Currently, only about a third do.
“To make this a breastfeeding country, we’ve got to realize women return to school and they return to the workplace,” said Lebbing, who also supports the creation of more worksite lactation facilities.
At colleges that don’t yet have lactation rooms, like the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, the pressure is on to open them. Robin Toblin, former chair of USC’s Graduate and Professional Student Senate’s Women’s Concerns Committee, pushed to have one added to the plans of a new student center, set to be complete in 2008.
Lebbing, of the La Leche League, is pleased by the progress. “Anything we can do to make breastfeeding more comfortable is good,” she said. “To increase breastfeeding rates is to ultimately create healthier mothers and babies.”
The universal lactation room sign marks the new facility at Columbia University, in New York City.
Photo by Adam Raymond