Mendolonium

Two weeks ago I packed up a suit, three books, my laptop, and a sandwich and headed off to LAX to hop a flight to Dulles for a job interview in D.C.  Before Thomas was born, I used to travel frequently for work (one to two times a month), taking in many cases the very same flight, leaving from the very same gate.  Although over three years had passed since my last solo business trip, the trip felt like I just done it just yesterday:  I even fit into my old suits as if I had never been pregnant.  There was , however, one huge change from the travels of my past:  I also packed a breastpump, a cooler, blocks of frozen “blue ice”, and a printout detailing TSA’s rules for carrying breastmilk on the plane for the 24-hour round trip.

Thousands of nursing mothers must bring pumped milk on board airplanes every year and, of course, I researched the TSA rules carefully, but I have worked with both the best and the worst in government bureaucracy for the past seven years and I suspected that I might have trouble with TSA.  LAX was a breeze.  I didn’t yet have any milk yet, but I did have the ice packs.  As per their policy, I declared the ice packs to the first TSA agent I encountered in the security line.  He gave me a “so what?” look and said that it wasn’t a problem.  I and and my supplies passed though security and the X-ray machine without incident.

For those of you who may not be familiar with how nursing works and why a nursing mother MUST pump and transport milk on the airplane, a brief primer.  Nursing a baby is a supply and demand process.  The baby “demands” milk when nursing and the mother’s body responds over time by “supplying” the demanded milk.  If the baby nurses more, more milk with be produced; less nursing means less milk.  This process is, however, not instantaneous and the mother’s body will produce milk according to it’s usual schedule for a while even in the absence of a baby.  Therefore, a nursing mother who wants or needs to be away from her baby for more than a few hours has to pump:  both to keep up her supply and to remove the milk which would otherwise build up putting the mother in excruciating pain*.  If the baby is being exclusively breastfed (which is the recommendation of both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Heath Organization) the mother will have needed to plan ahead for her trip by pumping (over the course of a week or more) enough “extra” milk for someone to feed her baby while she is away.  The mother will then need to bring the milk that she has pumped on her trip back to the baby to replenish her stockpile of frozen milk that the baby has been drinking from while she has been away.  Breastmilk is quite literally a priceless substance – it cannot be replicated in the lab, it cannot be bought – the nickname for it is “liquid gold”.  A nursing mother has no choice but to pump while travelling (on the order of 4 – 8 times a day) and transport the milk back with her on board the airplane.  It is true, that the the mother could technically put the milk in checked baggage, but how many of you won’t trust your clothes to the baggage handlers much less an irreplaceable substance that is your child’s only source of food.  Despite the hassle of pumping this process was relatively straightforward until 2006 which evidence of a terror plot was uncovered to blow up airplanes using liquid explosives.  Overnight,water, lipgloss, shampoo, and even breastmilk became forbidden.  The rules were eventually relaxed to permit small quantities (less than 3.4 ounces or 90 ml) of liquid to be carried on board the plane.  But a nursing mother produces far more than 3.4 ounces of milk in a day – in my case I was gone for 24 hours and the total was around 30 ounces.

After my disaster of an interview (a subject for another blog post methinks) I headed to Dulles with my quart of gold packed in a small cooler with frozen ice packs.  I was trying to make an earlier flight as a stand-by in order to get home as quickly as possible and was pleased to reach security to see that there was no line to speak of.  Just as at LAX, I declared the milk and ice packs to the first TSA agent in the line and that’s where the trouble started.  “But it’s under three ounces, right?” he asked cluelessly.  “No”, I replied.  “It is one day’s worth of breastmilk – about thirty ounces.”  “Oh”, he said with a surprised and uncomfortable look, “Just open it up then and tell the next agent.”  I wasn’t clear what he meant by “open it up” , but I proceeded to the X-ray line and unzipped the cooler so that the contents were clearly visible and placed it on the conveyor belt.  As soon as I and the milk were through, the agent operating the machine, glared at me an announced, “Oh we’re going to have to look at this.”  She then proceeded to place the open cooler on the top of the warm X-ray machine and kept on scanning other traveller’s belongings.  She made no attempt to tell any other agents that she believed additional screening was required.  After a few minutes of waiting, I interrupted her, reminding her that the milk was a perishable food item that needed to be kept cold and in a huff she called over to another agent to “deal with this”.  After another few minutes I and my belongings were led away to a side table where an agent asked me if he could open up the milk to test it.  “No”, I curtly replied it’s breastmilk – that would contaminate it.  He then sighed and said, “Well, we have to give you the full secondary screening then.”  I pointed out the TSA policy made no mention of a secondary screening being required and he replied that “that is the way we do it”.  I then spent the next twenty minutes being patted down, having my luggage dissected as much as humanly possible (including taking apart my laptop) and swabbed to test for the presence of explosives.  The agent patting me down, was extremely rude the entire time admonishing me that “You should have allowed more time”.   While waiting I noticed the distraught older woman being subjected to the same treatment.  She wasn’t carrying breastmilk, but carried a cooler marked “Bone Marrow, Live Human Tissue, Handle with Care”.  Her cooler was open and the agent screening her was rooting though it while the woman was forced to remove her scarf and sweater and submit to a pat down.  The attitude of every agent in my and her case seemed to be, “You are causing trouble for us by bringing something “difficult” on board the plane so we are going to cause trouble for you”.  After all the tests came back clean, I zipped up my cooler, re-packed my bags and raced off to the gate to make my standby flight just in the nick of time.  If I had been less comfortable with nursing I might have felt humiliated or embarrassed, instead I am proud of the lengths of I have gone to to nurse my children and I was incensed.  How dare the government that I support with my tax dollars harass me and other citizens for doing what is right and necessary.

I have the advantage of knowing a lot more than the average bear about intelligence and national security and as such I am even further insulted by TSA’s harassment and ineptitude.  One might argue that the terrorists might take advantage of exemptions for medical liquids/gels or breastmilk and thus smuggle explosives on board the plane…and here is why one would be wrong:

• First, TSA has been notoriously illogical and inconsistent with regards to security policy.  The difference in my treatment at LAX versus Dulles is but one example.   Any terrorist worth is salt will exploit these inconsistencies with the result that the policy is rendered completely ineffective.  Inconsistent security = insecurity.
• If TSA cannot test the medicine or the milk (and they do not because they cannot without contamination) it is pointless to pat down and test the luggage of traveler.  If the concern is liquid explosives, then either liquids must be banned or tested.  Feeling up traveller’s legs and powering on their laptops is not going to help
• TSA does not stop terrorists.  TSA and has never once thwarted a terrorist plot.  Not once.  Various intelligence services have stopped plots during the planning stages, passengers have reported suspicious activity which led to disaster being averted, and sadly as demonstrated on September 11, sometimes the terrorists have outsmarted the security measures.   Quite frankly, TSA should not be in the position of stopping terrorist plots – they are simply not equipped to cover all of the myriad of possibilities that terrorists can dream up.  TSA should be in the positi0n of focusing on the “low hanging fruit”:  the obvious, big dangers:  guns, large quantities of explosives, persons who are behaving suspiciously.  Terrorists are stopped by good intelligence and police work.  If they [the terrorists] have made it to the airport security line we, as a country, have something very wrong with our national security.

Our government needs to focus on truly keeping people safe, not on forcing us to jump through hoops that do nothing but harass us and even endanger our lives (I wonder who that bone marrow was going to and hope it was not harmed by TSA’s treatment.) while providing an utterly false sense of security.  Furthermore, regardless of the strictness of the policy, every traveler, from a nursing mother to the platinum level businessman deserves to be treated with respect.  I don’t know if I will have to fly again while nursing, but if I do and if I am harassed again, I am tempted to whip out my pump on the spot to prove my status as a nursing mother and demonstrate exactly where that milk came from.

* If you’re having trouble envisioning why this would be painful imagine if someone took a syringe and pumped 4 – 8 ounces (a typical amount milk that will be produced for one feeding) of water under your skin.  Your skin would be literally be stretched to the breaking point.  It would not feel good.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under A Piece of My Mind, Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.