OK look, I’ve had two babies. I’ve nursed two babies.
I’ve nursed babies in cars, in restaurants, in church cry rooms, in empty offices, in the neighbor’s formal living room while everyone else was ten feet away in the kitchen. I’ve nursed babies while pushing a stroller down a street, and standing on a boardwalk in a crowd, and sitting in packed parking lots. I once nursed my baby on the side of the highway next to a cornfield (don’t ask).
And I tell you all these incredibly personal details so you know I’m no stranger to the consistent, often inconvenient requirements of being a nursing mom with a baby who needs to eat every 1-3 hours. I’ve been there. I get it. And I have great sympathy for working moms who have to figure out how to juggle the joys of lactation with the pressure of paying one’s bills.
But I’ll also tell you this: as understanding as I am about moms needing to conduct a natural bodily function for the health and wellbeing of their kid, I never quietly shuffled off to nurse my child in the middle of a job someone was counting on me to do. Especially when someone else’s life depended on me doing said job.
And yet here we have this lady, who reportedly snuck off without telling anyone to nurse her child in the middle of her active role as a - checks notes - on-duty Secret Service agent.
True story. According to this, the Secret Service is now investigating reports that an on-duty agent left her assigned post at a Trump campaign event Wednesday without telling anybody and snuck into a side room meant to be used for security emergencies so she could nurse her baby.
“During a Donald Trump visit to North Carolina yesterday, a woman Secret Service special agent abandoned her post to breastfeed with no permission/warning to the event site agent,” wrote RealClear Politics reporter Susan Crabtree.
Crabtree added the unnamed agent, who was from the agency’s Atlanta Field Office, was found by her boss only a few minutes before Trump arrived at the site
“The site agent went to do one final sweep of the walking route and found the agent breast-feeding her child in a room that is supposed to be set aside for important Secret Service official work, i.e. a potential emergency related to the president,” Crabtree reported.
Oh, and it gets worse. Crabtree goes on, "The woman agent was in the room with two other family members. The agent and her family members bypassed the Uniformed Division checkpoint and were escorted by an unpinned event staff into the room to breastfeed, the sources said. Unpinned means they have not been cleared by the Secret Service to be there."
The USSS field office reportedly responded to the incident by saying it had "no impact to the North Carolina event," and that "the specifics of this incident are being examined."
On top of being highly concerning on its own, this particular moment in history isn’t exactly the best time for a Secret Service agent to be heading off to a safe room to boob their kid (sidenote: why was her baby there in the first place?), considering the flak that the USSS has caught in recent weeks after the absolute debacle at that Trump rally on July 13, when the former president was shot in the ear by a gunman perched on an unsecured nearby rooftop while Trump's female body guards fumbled all over themselves like they'd just been pulled off mall cop duty the day before.
Nor does it look good just a week after another female USSS agent was caught on surveillance footage breaking into a privately owned hair salon so people could use the business' bathroom during a nearby Harris campaign event.
To be extremely clear here, as a twice-former mother of infants who more than once nursed her kid under a blazer while on a company Zoom call: I’m a strong advocate for moms who breastfeed their babies. And I’m a big proponent of society and the professional world making reasonable space for women to care for their kids.
And I’m also a non-idiot who understands that there are times and places where it’s not appropriate to slink off and whip out a nipple. Such as when you’re on duty to protect a former president from active threats like, oh I don’t know, deranged gunmen.