The last thing new mum Jessie Maher needed in her already chaotic life was more stress, but that’s the very thing the Connecticut mum got during a trip to Target when a man started verbally harassing her for breastfeeding.
According to the new mum, her daughter Zinnia started crying as they paid for their shopping. Hurrying to finish the transaction, Jessie sat down with her daughter on a nearby chair to breastfeed.
That was when the man came up to her.
“I plopped myself down and started feeding her right away…I was just sort of minding my own business—just sitting there—when the man turned around and saw me,” she said in a TODAY Parents story. “He started talking to me and yelling at me. He said, ‘Do you have to do that here? Can’t you go somewhere else? Can’t you cover up?'”
Soon the man began to to speak louder, growing angrier by the second. “Can’t you do that somewhere else?…That’s f***ing disgusting…You are nasty.”
“It got kind of scary,” Jessie recalled. “The only thing I said to him at that point—really the entire time—was, ‘I am feeding my baby. I have the right to be here.’”
Jessie turned away from the man, but he still continued with his verbal assault, so she picked up her cellphone then and began recording.
In the now-viral video, another shopper and a group of Target employees can be seen coming to Jessie’s aid. They shielded her and told the man to leave her alone.
Later, the shopper wearing a green shirt told Jessie that she has five kids of her own.
“I loved that she kind of stepped in and became my mama bear,” said Jessie. “I felt very protected and when everyone stood up for me, I knew nothing was going to happen to us.”
Working as a doula, Jessie felt that she has a responsibility not only to her clients but to people everywhere to show such behaviour happening in the real world.
“I really do feel like this needs to be talked about,” she said. “People need to know that I’m not the only mum that’s been attacked for breastfeeding. He’s not the only man who has attacked a mum for breastfeeding…There’s too much shaming of women for all of their choices—too much attacking of mums.”
Because her video was posted on her Facebook account, Jessie later learned the identity of the man at Target, thanks to one of her followers. But she said that she’s not planning on bringing the police into the matter.
The video going viral is punishment enough, she said.
“If you see a mum being attacked for anything—even if it’s just a choice she’s making about how she will feed her baby or where she will give birth—stick up for her,” she added. “She’s made a choice and it has nothing to do with anyone else… Mamas have to stick up for each other.”
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