A father who recently went through airport security with his wife and 9-month-old baby has an important question for TSA.
They discarded his wife’s breast milk and he’s questioning why: “Wondering why mother’s milk was tossed by TSA and why they considered it ‘dangerous’ when we had passed through security several times with milk and had no problem before.”
While many breastfeeding Moms, whether they were traveling with baby or not, have experienced this type of treatment from TSA, hearing a Fathers perspective on the matter is interesting.
The dad wrote a post in the breastfeeding section on reddit explaining his family’s experience and looking for answers.
“So, TSA decided that my daughter’s lunch was dangerous and had to be discarded,” he wrote in the post. “Mind you, until that particular incident, we were pleasantly surprised by the good service and common sense by the agents in all our interactions with them during our trip.”
The family had a number of stops on their trip already, passing through security in Dallas, San Antonio, and New York City, but the father says “things turned sour” on the last stop of the journey.
We were going through security when the female TSA agent checking the milk called the supervisor. I had noticed, that unlike previous times where they checked the milk for a bit and then gave it to us after a couple of minutes, this time it was taking longer. After a few more minutes, the supervisor decided “an alarm had gone off” and notified us that the milk we had for the trip was not allowed to go through, and he would have to discard it.
We asked if the baby could drink the milk in the offending bottle instead of being thrown away, but this was not acceptable. I got a pat down by an agent (very professional, mind you) and we were let trough after a while. I WANTED to ask a question to the officer but knew better than to argue or seem “argumentative” (we all know where that road goes, eh) so I kept my mouth shut.
So here is the question: why, if the same expressed milk from my wife was used, in the same bottle, in the same container and with the same ice packs, on different dates, and we did not have a problem before, did they throw [away] this particular milk?
The Dad ended the post on a positive note: “At least we still had plenty of time left before our flight. They have a great nursing room in [Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport] (San Antonio Airport, your nursing room smells like poop, by the way — fix it) so baby did not go hungry.”