There are certain social norms about whose needs are more important than others. Often, this is a result of past discrimination. For example, handicapped people are normally seen by society as having needs that must be met at any cost, and it is taboo to complain about this. Breast-feeding mothers are the same way. If there is any debate in the media or among the public that involves a breast-feeding mother and an unrelated male, the breast-feeding mother is going to win every time, period. Those are the values our society has.

OP didn't do anything wrong, but there wasn't much he could have done to avoid this situation either. If he paid extra to sit in the bulkhead, he should look into getting a refund. If not, c'est la vie.

Moderator time-out.
 

Two of the forum's moderators have just spent a lot of time editing or deleting posts in order to rid this thread of unduly personalized attacks by a few on other members, of the type long barred by the FlyerTalk Rules (aka Terms of Service).

Surely the participants in this discussion can discuss the topic without attacking each other or other members -- especially during the holiday season!

This thread is going to be closed overnight for a cooling-off period. When it reopens, we'd strongly encourage that the discussion continue within the terms of the Rules - on the topic as framed by the OP and not on attacking each other. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator.

As promised in the post above, this thread has now been re-opened with the expectation that discussion will be about the topic, and not about other members in a personalized way. Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator.

I assume that she was exposing her breast's otherwise why would her complaint of the OP staring at her resulted in his being "made" to relocate his seat?Why hadn't an FA offered a blanket for her to cover up if she had complained of feeling uncomfortable ?

[Off-topic comment edited by Moderator.]


The lav on a packed aircraft offers privacy.If a breast feeding woman wants to expose her breast's rather than cover up and doesn't want to feel uncomfortable exposing her breast's in public....then the lav provides that privacy.A suckling baby doesn't "eat" the same way as you do.On a flight a breast feeding woman can also chose to feed her baby from a pre-prepared bottle if she doesn't want to cover up whilst breast feeding in public.Any woman that exposes her breast's in public can expect to have people look at her.I would have looked in astonishment that someone could be so selfishly uncaring as to the strangers around her.In some cultures the sight of a woman exposing her breast's could be highly offensive.Where was the flight from?

I have breast fed all three of my children, both in public and in the privacy of my own home.
There is absolutely no need to expose any of the breast to public view. Apart from arranging my clothes so that breast feeding could be done easily, I always carried a scarf as an additional cover-up.

There are, however, some good reasons for not wanting to breast feed beside a stranger. The chief of these for me was that, once the baby is old enough to be aware of strangers, the presence of an unknown person can sometimes distract the baby from feeding, so that the whole process becomes unnecessarily prolonged.

So, whose problem is that? The stranger's? The breast-feeder?

I am very sympathetic to nursing mothers, but this is a silly analogy.

If the major concern here is the infant, he or she is not eating off of a surface of the lav but off of mom's breast, a unit designed to function for the purpose in any number of environments, generally not sterile ones or even close to clean. Even today infants in the third world nurse in roadways full of blaring traffic, dust, and heaven knows what else. It's eat, or die. Seven billion former infants can't have managed to be that picky that a stranger's glance or noise or dirt in the surroundings would have put them off. If mom's breast is reasonably clean, that likely suffices - breast milk is full of antibodies in any case.

I don't think either had to move. Mom could have discreetly used a towel or blanket. She played the trump card not for her infant, but for herself.

I'm at a loss to figure out why the parents didn't arrange to sit next to each other in the first place, which would have solved their problems. Clearly breast feeding is a huge issue for this mother, she really should have arranged things better. Pay extra for seating, catch another flight, fly up the front of the plane, taken tried to change with the person next to her husband (in which case everyone would have won). Bullying seems to have been her best solution.

It's obvious that the best solution to the complaining mother's problem would have been to move her and her baby to the center seat in the back row of coach.....

I would never move without compensation if I paid extra for that seat. I'd ask the mother to compensate me twice the fee I paid herself with cash, not the airline. If it's really a problem for her, she would pay. I have the right to look in any direction for any length of time, whether socially accepted or not. If the airline calls the police, that's grounds for a lawsuit. Let them get negative publicity for this.

It would all depend on who booked when. In all probably the OP book first and got their seat, sometime afterwards the others which at that point there was no opportunity for them to all sit together. Thus the story at hand ...

My suggestion to the OP is to file a complaint with the airline and DOT. I doubt that it will do much other than give them a black mark in the complaint column.

That's my thinking too, in which case it's not the OP's problem. Or at least it shouldn't be.

Better than nothing. I had a similar complaint (ie not major, but very annoying) with a different airline, they were determined not to do anything beyond apologise, so I kept the correspondence going with them for far longer than was necessary just to keep their expenses up and to hold an unresolved complaint on their books. They gave up before I did.

Did she breastfeed (is it one word or two??) the entire flight? Then, why have the OP move for other than times she was feeding her child? This was clearly a ploy to get the seat for her husband that they couldn't get otherwise; really nice people! SHE has rights, HE has no rights. Breast feeding (see, I'm flexible on the spelling) is common here in Asia, but the mother almost always has the decency to cover up during these times, so what is there to see? If not, she should not feel "uncomfortable". Emirates was wrong in so many ways here.

I don't think there is much you could have done, but I think you are lucky that if it had escalated, you were inbound to SEA rather than DXB.

The big plus for breast-feeding a baby on a flight, while the baby is being fed, it is NOT crying.:p