Breastfeeding Mom Sues Texas RoadHouse After Manager Tries to Cover Her With Napkin

If you have children, you know that there are only three ways to feed a baby. The first one is breastfeeding. The second one is bottle feeding pumped breastmilk. The third one is formula feeding.

While you can feed a baby with any combination of these three options, breastfeeding is definitely the most natural, purest and cheapest option. Let’s be real. Formula is trying to duplicate what breastmilk naturally contains, and it can be pretty expensive.

Many moms choose to exclusively breastfeed their babies, and this means that anytime the baby needs to be fed, anywhere the baby is, the mom needs to feed him or her. Thankfully, breastfeeding with or without a cover is now legal in all 50 states, but apparently not everyone is abiding by this law.

Recently, at a Texas Roadhouse in Kentucky, Sadie Durbin was having dinner with her husband when her 7-week-old baby started getting fussy. She says, “She got hungry, so she needed to nurse. I latched her on like I always do, and she was nursing for maybe five minutes when I saw the manager coming around the corner, walking fast and shaking his head at me with a napkin in his hands.”

According to the manager, a father of 6 children, he had been receiving a lot of complaints from other customers about Durbin breastfeeding her baby without a cover. Durbin says the manager tried to put the napkin over her baby’s face. When Durbin refused to cover the baby with a napkin, the manger dropped the napkin on the table and stormed off.

Although Durbin wasn’t using a nursing cover, she was trying to be as discreet as possible. She says, “There were two giant peanut buckets in front of me, she was wrapped up in a blanket and I had her in a cross-cradle position, as discrete as I can be. I find it really difficult, pretty much impossible, to cover. I have to hold my breast, I have to hold the [nipple] shield, and I have to hold her head perfectly in order to nurse her. She unlatches as soon as I try to put a cover over her.”

Durbin noticed the manager talking to a female customer who seemed to be upset. That prompted her to ask her waitress if she knew who had complained about her breastfeeding. Instead of an answer, the manager came back and once again tried to encourage Durbin to cover up. Durbin was really upset at this point, and she and her husband ended up leaving the restaurant.

Durbin decided to vent about the experience on Facebook, and by 7am, when she woke up the next day, her post already had thousands of comments. Many of them were supportive, but many of them were very negative and even threatening.

Durbin has decided to sue Texas Roadhouse because she says, “There’s a law, but there’s no penalty attached to the law.” She also hopes that by sharing her experience it will help prevent other mothers from being in the same situation and feeling like she felt. She says, “I think that if I can avoid one mom feeling like I felt in that situation, then yes, I am happy I spoke out.”

What would you have done if you had been in Durbin’s situation?