Terri Theodore , THE CANADIAN PRESS

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VANCOUVER - A menagerie of nursing mothers, their babies, older children, some fathers, baby strollers and the media crammed clothing store H&M Thursday in a breastfeeding protest.

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THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

A woman holds a sign as her child nurses at an H & M clothing store in Vancouver, B.C., on Thursday August 7, 2008.

The women were angry over a store clerk's request to Manuela Valle last week to move to a change room while she nursed her two-month-old baby.

Veronica Polanska, one of the organizers of the so-called "nurse-in", said the protest wasn't about Valle or H&M specifically.

She said the women wanted to draw attention to the outrage they feel when any business suggests nursing in public is shameful and should be hidden.

"It's about every business, whether it's an airline or whether it's a restaurant, whether it's a pool ... it doesn't matter where it happens, it's not acceptable."

Astrid Lalonde didn't know Valle, but brought her six-week-old baby girl because she said society seems to have a poor perception of women who breastfeed in public, yet cleavage seems to be predominant.

"Breastfeeding is not a sexual thing," she said.

"But it is sad in our society where breasts are the one thing, or the one asset, that women can show to flaunt to get men. When I'm breastfeeding my child, I'm not trying to get a man."

Six years ago, when Yolonda Kozak was on a Vancouver bus, another woman reached over and disconnected her son as she was nursing him.

"I was such a new mother, I didn't have anything to say," she said.

Since then Kozak has been an advocate for public breastfeeding. "Now you can't stop me."

Valle had planned to take her complaint to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

In 2000, the B.C. Human Rights Commission issued a policy and procedure manual on the issue of breastfeeding and expressing milk in public.

"Entities that provide public services (or) facilities customarily available to the public also have a duty to accommodate lactating women," the policy states.

The policy even spells out that mothers are allowed to breastfeed or express milk on public benches found in shopping malls, museums, hospitals and restaurants.

H&M didn't return phones calls for a requested interview.

Elisabeth Sterken, the national director of the Infant Feeding Action Coalition, said her organization constantly gets complaints from women being harassed when they nurse their babies in public.

She tells the story of a woman who was ejected from a lingerie shop while trying to nurse and another woman at a public pool where an attendant called the police when she refused to go to the washroom to nurse her child.

"It's offensive to women that that attitude persists," Sterken said of the negative reaction to public breastfeeding.

While seeing plenty of cleavage is a fashion statement, Sterken said breastfeeding hasn't yet been embraced.

"We have also run amok with the whole sexualization of breast and the nurturing side of breasts is just not something that is very visible," Sterken said.

"So there's still a lot of ignorance about the full capacity of breasts."

Sterken said most women in Canada - between 90 and 95 per cent - breastfeed their baby for some length of time after birth.

Marina Green, a lactation specialist at B.C.'s Women's and Children's Hospital, said for that reason, women nursing in public should be commonplace, but mothers still feel socially isolated.

Green said some women in the hospital's nursing groups who have no choice but to breastfeed in public "steel themselves" to take the unkind words or dirty looks from the public.

Both Green and Sterken agree that attitudes towards public breastfeeding are slowly shifting, but not fast enough.

Green said taking the issue to a human rights tribunal is probably one of the best ways to get the message across.

"The fact that it's news is remarkable in this day and age. We really have a long way to go in terms of shifting deep-seated attitudes."