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Breastfeeding While Working
Nursing parents should not be penalized at work because they want to provide food for their babies.
Legal protections exist to help parents maintain milk supply while away from their children, but not enough workers understand their rights or where to go when those rights are violated. As a result, parents are forced to wean their babies early, endure painful health complications, or even lose their jobs.
A Better Balance is educating and empowering nursing mothers to exercise their rights on the job, and helping to enforce laws designed to support women who want to continue breastfeeding after they return to work.
Guaranteeing Lactation Accommodations for All Workers
We are proud to have helped lead efforts to successfully pass the PUMP (Providing Urgent Maternal Protections) for Nursing Mothers Act in 2022, which expanded critical protections to nearly all nursing parents, ensuring millions more workers have a clear right to time and space to pump breastmilk at work. The PUMP Act strengthened the 2010 Break Time for Nursing Mothers Law, extending the law’s protections to 9 million more employees who were previously uncovered, including nurses, teachers, and software engineers. Visit “The PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act: What You Should Know” to learn more, and read the full text of the law here.
Empowering Workers to Nurse and Pump Milk on Their Own Terms
Federal law and many states require employers to give nursing parents time and space to express breastmilk in the workplace. We educate and empower nursing parents to exercise their rights at work. To learn more, visit the Workplace Rights Hub, our state by state legal guide to understanding and asserting your rights to breastfeeding in the workplace. You can also visit our “Talking to Your Boss About Your Pump” series (created in partnership with WorkLife Law) to help you figure out how to discuss your breastfeeding needs with your employer.
Advocating for State Protections
A Better Balance is working to improve enforcement of state-level lactation laws and to expand protections for nursing mothers at work and beyond. We fight for stronger statewide break time and space laws, with recent victories in Georgia, South Carolina, and New York.
Workplace Rights Hub
Resource Articles
60%
of women stop breastfeeding earlier than they would like.
50%
of new mothers report that their plans for employment had an impact on their baby-feeding decisions
Only 40%
of nursing moms have access to both adequate break time and a private space to express breast milk while at work
