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Hundreds of breastfeeding mothers protested at airports across the United States on Tuesday after a woman was kicked off a plane by a flight attendant for nursing her child.
The mothers and supporters gathered in front of Delta Airlines ticket counters at 33 airports to express their outrage over the incident and raise public awareness about breastfeeding, organizers said.
"You have women walking down the street in this country showing more cleavage than any nursing mother you'll ever encounter," Ashley Clark, who was taking part in the protest at New York's JFK International Airport, told AFP.
"It's fine when it's busting out and yet women who are doing something so completely natural, feeding their children, are somehow affected."
The incident that prompted the protest took place on October 13 and involved Emily Gillette, a 27-year-old mother who was nursing her 22-month-old daughter on board a Freedom Airlines flight that was three hours late in taking off.
A flight attendant for Freedom Airlines, a regional airline for Delta, asked Gillette to cover herself with a blanket and ordered her off the flight when she refused. Gillette was sitting in a window seat in the back of the plane and next to her husband while nursing her child.
Freedom Airlines subsequently publicly apologized for the incident and said the flight attendant who ordered her off the plane had been disciplined.
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AFPLifestyle-US-family-nursing-airline
AFP 211559 GMT 11 06
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