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Mom kicked out of Florida restaurant for breastfeeding her baby under a blanket

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Every few months or so we see one of these stories: "Breastfeeding mom kicked out of restaurant/shopping mall/grocery store/airplane/swimming pool," usually because she refused to cover her child and spare all the shrinking violets stuck in that space with her the lurid site of a human nipple dripping with vile beast milk. "It's unsanitary!" someone usually shouts. "Breastfeeding mother!" screams another, a phrase akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater. But this story is a little different:

Simone Bertucci's family was celebrating her son's thirteenth birthday in a Houston's restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida. During the meal, the restaurant's manager interrupted the family's lively conversation, telling Simone she had to leave while she was nursing her baby---5-month-old Marcello, who was dining at her breast underneath a blanket! So apparently, at Houston's restaurants, you can't even breastfeed your kid under a blanket without upsetting the other customers. Perhaps this has something to do with South Florida, where the elderly population has increased the curmudgeon factor seventy fold in the last half century. Unaware that such an order is contrary to Florida laws on public breastfeeding, Bertucci was "shocked and humiliated," and her husband wanted to leave the restaurant, but instead she insisted on finding another place to breastfeed her son, opting for the baking-hot car in the parking lot.

"I want an apology, a public apology," Bertucci says. "If it happened to me, it's going to happen again and again." She contacted an attorney who encouraged her to document the incident in a police report. Glenn Viers, vice president and general counsel of the company that owns Houston's, sent Bertucci an apologetic letter that said, "We mishandled the situation and we very much regret it," Viers said. "I can't un-ring a bell. I've got three kids and my wife breastfed. Stuff happens. We're human, we make mistakes and we strive not to."

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Start by teaching him that it is safe to do so.