Akademik

n.

A room provided by an employer where new mothers can pump breast milk.

As a rule, the posher the employer, the plusher the pump station. Traders at Goldman Sachs can use an online booking service to reserve time in dedicated lactation rooms, equipped with pumps and chairs; baristas at Starbucks are left to line up to use the customers' loo. In 2007, Oregon became the first state to pass a law requiring companies with more than twenty-five employees to provide "non-bathroom" lactation rooms. (A national media campaign asks, reasonably enough, if you wouldn't make your kid a sandwich in a public rest room, why would you expect a woman to bottle her baby's milk in one?)

—Jill Lepore, " Baby food: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/19/090119fa_fact_lepore," The New Yorker, January 19, 2009

WHAT MOTHERS NEED FROM EMPLOYERS

Privacy to express milk, either in a lockable private office or designated lactation room with an electrical outlet and a sink.

Flexibility to take breaks to express milk two to three times during a typical workday. Each session takes around 15 minutes, plus time to get to the lactation room.

—Hannah Wolfso, " Breast-feeding good for baby, business: http://nola.live.advance.net/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-12/122681945666010.xml&coll=1," Times-Picayune, November 16, 2008

Coverdale said public health officials had long been planning the facility for new mothers, and that gave them someplace to put it. Equipment already is on hand, he said.

"One portion of it will be a lactation room," Coverdale said.

In the facility, there will be breast pumps and refrigerators where breast milk can be stored.

—"Statehouse to Open Room for Breast Feeding," The Omaha World-Herald, August 12, 1992