Cop Catches Woman Breastfeeding in Her Car, Gives Her a Ticket

A mother in New York City is fighting a parking ticket that she received when she pulled over to breastfeed her baby, CBS New York is reporting. Guillermina Rodriguez has four children and she was driving through midtown Manhattan in mid-July when her three-week-old baby started crying in the backseat. Instantly, Rodriguez knew her baby was hungry. She didn’t plan to need to stop to feed her baby, but there was an unusual amount of traffic that day, she said. It took her more than 45 minutes to go from 42nd street to 30th street. As most parents know, when a baby that young is hungry, they have to be fed. When she finally found a place where she could pull over, it was in a commercial area. However, she wasn’t obstructing traffic. She just needed to be there for a little while to feed her infant. She climbed into the back seat of her vehicle and a few minutes after she started nursing her baby, a New York Police Department tow trucked pulled up to tow her truck. She said he was backing up to tow her vehicle and she had to jump to the front seat to honk the horn to alert the tow truck driver that she was in her vehicle. At that point, the ticket agent got out of his vehicle and walked over to her truck.

Rodriguez had both of her breasts out because she was breastfeeding on one side and pumping on the other, and she told the agent that she was breastfeeding her baby. The man looked at her and said, “Oh, OK,” then he put the ticket on her windshield and left. Essentially, she was slapped with a $156 ticket for being parked in a commercial zone. The NYPD told the news station that the agent actually wrote out the ticket before he saw that Rodriguez was breastfeeding and he didn’t have the authority to void the ticket so his hands were tied. Rodriguez feels that they should be a little more sensitive.

She is hoping that the NYPD will exempt the fine. Here’s a news story about this incident.