A Newmarket pool owner dipped her toe into a controversial issue when she banned a woman who was breast feeding her child from the private facility.
Cinira Longuinho, 32, claims she was sitting on the steps of the pool, which are covered with water but are not completely submerged. She had been encouraged by her doctor to feed her 20-month-old daughter breast milk, and knew it was within her legal right to do so in public.
She didn't think much of feeding Camilla, and that's why she says she was stunned when she was asked to cover up October 24.
"This lady came and she said that she was the owner and had a complaint and for me to use the change room to breast-feed," explains Longuinho.
"I was very surprised, very shocked about all that and didn't know what to do so I stopped breast-feeding."
But she didn't understand the decision, and she didn't feel right about it. So she took her complaint against the AquaCenter Swim Pool and Ellie Karkouti to the
Ontario Human Rights Commission.
"Breast-feeding is like something that since my childhood I always dreamed about when I had a baby I would breast-feed her," she described.
However, Karkouti, who is pregnant herself, said it was not the act of breast feeding, but a sanitary issue.
In fact, she even put a sign (below) up outside the facility.
"You're not supposed to obviously urinate in the pool. If you have an open cut or a sore you're not supposed to go in the pool. So a bodily fluid is a bodily fluid," she argued.
"The mother should not be allowed to do that," Karkouti added.
She proposed a compromise, saying nursing mothers could feed their babies as long as they were six feet back from the open water. But she says Longuinho and her supporters didn't agree to that, so she has banned them from the centre.
That's fine with Longuinho. When asked if she would ever go back, she said, "no, I don't think so."
Karkouti does plan to breastfeed, just not in a pool.
Find out what the Ontario Human Rights Commission has to say about breastfeeding
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