Senate Allows Breast-Feeding Measure To Die Women Lawmakers Angered Over Male Senators’ Attitude Toward Bill

The women in the House thought it was a sure thing this year - legislative passage of a law saying that women who breast-feed in public cannot be charged with indecent exposure.

But the Senate late Friday let the House bill die despite the fact that it sat for days on the calendar, waiting for a vote.

“I’m a little upset,” one of the measure’s sponsors, Rep. Eileen Cody, D-Seattle, said Saturday. “‘Personally, I think the problem over there in the Senate is the men just didn’t take this issue seriously. Some told me they thought it was silly. Some thought the whole thing was a joke.”

“We saw this as the minimum we can do for breast-feeding women who get harassed when they try to feed their babies in public,” said another sponsor, Rep. Jeri Costa, D-Marysville.

“We’ve found no cases in this state of women actually being charged with indecent exposure for breast-feeding in public, but we have heard of women being threatened with the charge,” she said.

Senate Floor Leader Steve Johnson, R-Kent, who directs bill traffic in the Senate, said there was no grand conspiracy to kill the measure, HB1194.

There wasn’t even any particular opposition to it, he said.

“It’s one of about 150 bills we didn’t do” because the chamber, which traditionally moves at about half the speed of the House, ran out of time, he said. In a short, 60-day session, a whole lot of legislation that people care about doesn’t make it, he said.

But Cody said other male senators, whom she declined to name, “spent a lot of time joking about the bill. One wanted to know if there would be an age limit on who could be breast-fed in public. Ha, ha, ha.”

The measure passed the House weeks ago by a vote of 91-6 and emerged from a Senate committee with a unanimous vote. Last year, the House killed the measure after conservatives and business lobbyists balked at several provisions.

Costa and Cody overcame objections this year after dropping language that would have said women have a right to breast-feed in any public or private place, including at work, and allowed for a civil fine of up to $1,000 to be assessed of any person found to have violated the right.

Instead, the bill says simply that women who breast-feed in public cannot be charged with indecent exposure.

The measure also would have required businesses to provide, at the least, a “clean lavatory with a locking door” where working women could express breast milk to feed their babies later.

A business that gave women time to express milk and provided a place to refrigerate it would be able to designate itself “baby friendly,” under the measure.