Breastfeeding in public continues to be a hot-button issue somehow in 2016, although the justifiable consensus is that if the sight of a woman feeding her child makes you uncomfortable, that’s on you. That was the attitude of bystanders who jumped to a Connecticut woman’s defense earlier this week, when a man began verbally abusing her for having the gall to breastfeed her baby in a Target Cafe area.
Jessie Maher wrote in a Facebook video post that has now been shared nearly 80,000 times that, before she started rolling video, the man had aggressively asked that she “do that somewhere else” then swore at her and called her “disgusting” and a “whore” when she didn’t comply. By the time Maher started filming, the man was demanding a refund for his hot dog or soft pretzel or whatever he had purchased at the cafe, ostensibly because the sight of a woman providing nourishment to her child made him too disgusted to be able to eat.
Thankfully, Good Samaritans nearby rushed to intervene, with one woman shielding Maher from the man, telling the mother, now in tears, “He has no right to be doing what he’s doing, you have a baby in your hands.” By that point several Target employees were on the scene attempting to diffuse the situation, and Maher later told Eyewitness News 3 that the man left shortly after.
Maher plans to file a police report, but the identity of the man in the video is either unknown or has not been made public. Since he hates breastfeeding in public so much, we’ll see how going viral for shaming a woman breastfeeding in public treats him.