Abstract
B
Yet, moms all across America face far too many challenges when it comes to breastfeeding at work, in transit, and at home. As a nation, we need to ensure that children and new moms have access to safe lactation rooms, and I do not mean you need to be breastfeeding your children in private. I think it is perfectly fine to breastfeed wherever you want to breastfeed. However, as a working mom, as I was traveling, I just did not want to be pumping breast milk in the middle of the airport waiting room or wherever. You need to have that safe, private place and it should not be a toilet stall. As someone who used a wheelchair more often than not, I know the breastfeeding lactation room was actually the handicapped stall of the toilet.
I am always thinking of ways of how we can help new parents and children and how much we can help them to grow and succeed. I have good news and bad news about the FAM Act, which I introduced. It requires airports—large- and medium-sized airports—which is about 95% of the airports in this country to have safe, clean, convenient, and accessible lactation rooms in every terminal.
I realized that one of the things that I could do to make this move along is establish a funding mechanism. One thing in Washington is, it is all about how you get funding and simply by making it ok for airports to access the airport improvement fund, which was the thing that got us through the barrier. If you buy a ticket, it includes an airport fee. That fee is put aside into an account that is used to fix the runways and install new lights. And all I did was tell the airports, “You can use that fund to set up a lactation room.”
So, it passed out of the House with both Republican and Democratic votes. I went and found Republican House members because in California, it is already California law. All of the men standing around me on the floor signed right on to it, it was great. It was going to be in the FAA bill, but the FAA authorization bill got cut up in a political battle that had nothing to do with this. It had to do with privatization of the airspace and that died. So, it is not yet law, but we are going to reintroduce it to make sure that it gets through. It was nonpartisan. Hopefully, the FAA bill will pass this year.
I heard about how disheartening and frustrating it is from so many moms. They are traveling. They are trying to work and take care of their babies and express breast milk. I talked to so many moms who regularly Fed-Ex'd breast milk from wherever they were with ice packets back home, all around the country. I talked to moms who would have their breast milk spoil and would have to have it dumped. Let me tell you, as someone who lactated, but not very much, every drop is precious. I worked for every single drop that was in those bottles. So, I think that this just takes common sense. We know and understand the importance of breastfeeding. I think that Americans generally support this, but it is one of those issues that is, in a way, hidden until it affects your life and your family. So, we just need to make it as easy as possible for businesses, public areas, and public services to make breastfeeding support available.
I am also working to support women's healthcare at large. As members of the academy, you understand how important quality healthcare is for women in this country. You know that when a woman struggles to pay for the healthcare that she needs, her whole family suffers, her community suffers, and her country suffers. Our healthcare system needs to provide women with essential, quality care and a core part of that care comes from women's healthcare providers and the reality is, many of our nations families would not be here today if not for people like you out there doing the hard work. While I am not sure how you got into the field that you are in right now, I am sure it was not for the big bucks and the glamour because, if it was, you are in the wrong room. This is not a field that you get into for the huge amounts of money that you can make. You are in this because of the passion that you have and the dedication to our families, and I thank you for that because it is a real service. So, we need to protect things like access to maternity coverage, cancer screening, and coverage for breastfeeding support and supplies. Our families and our nation depend on it.
You know, when I talk to folks, especially my colleagues across the aisle, I try to come up with ways to talk to them in ways so that we can have a joint language because sometimes it feels like we are from very different perspectives. And one of the ways that I can talk to my colleagues is to talk about national defense and say that this is important to national defense. They say, “what do you mean breastfeeding is important to national defense?” And I say, “well it is.” Our military cannot serve and go overseas without its female military members; so we need to support their success because our military will not be able to succeed and will not be able to do its job. The Military Officers Association of America just put out a study that of all the young people in this country today, who are of the correct age to serve in the military, 71% of them are not qualified to serve.
Several reasons exist for this. Number one, they cannot pass the basic math, science, and English test. In the military, all of its manuals are written at the sixth grade level; so they must have math and English skills at that level to serve. However, there are others, and this is where you come in; they have childhood illnesses that are either preventable or treatable, that were not treated, and that have been allowed to progress to the point that they cannot serve in the military such as asthma or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The final category is that they have some sort of felony conviction usually tied to the opioid epidemic. So, our military, which is trying to recruit people to be in the greatest military on the face of the earth, has 71% of its recruiting pool already excluded before they even started. That does not make for a strong military. When I have those conversations with my colleagues who may not care about women's health issues, I talk about the fact that if you do not have strong children growing up in this country and they do not get the benefits of breastfeeding and early childhood care, and all of the investments are made in them, we will not have them in that pool of potential recruits to fly those helicopters, to drive those tanks, and to lead our military. So, it is in our nation's best interest to do so, if only for that alone; however, we know that it is so much more than that.
It is about, at the very base, what we mean as a nation, the values that we stand for, and the fact that everyone gets a shot at the American dream. That means that we invest in ourselves, in our families, and in our children. It is about how we compete economically and how we compete on a global scale. We cannot attract the best workers to this country if other places have better family and maternity policies than we do because people will leave and go there, including many Americans. We cannot attract the best minds to become entrepreneurs in this country. We cannot attract people to invest in America if they see, “you know, my workers get better treatment in places like Sweden and Norway and Germany, and places that compete against us.” So, it is in our economic interest to do this. We are foolish if we do not make these investments in our nation.
So, I just wanted to bring that up because I wanted to thank you for the work that you do. I know that sometimes it gets characterized as “This is a women's issue. This is a children's issue. This is a maternity issue.” It is more than that; it is a national security issue and a global competitiveness issue as well. What you are doing here is, first and foremost, what is needed for our kids and our families, and if you only did it for that, thank you. However, more importantly, it is also about national security. It is also about economic competitiveness. It is also about the greatness of this nation and where we stand on the world stage. We cannot be the last developed nation on the world stage that does not have maternity leave coverage; we just cannot. We must fix that, and it starts from contraceptive coverage all the way through helping with birth and breastfeeding.
So, thank you for letting me be here, I am about to go back to the Hill and fight some more battles because that is what I do. God Bless.