A reasonable accomodation – or one demand too many?

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 10:58 pm by Jane the Actuary

A reasonable accomodation – or one demand too many? 2015-02-26T22:58:28-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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From today’s Chicago Tribune:

By the time she sits for the Illinois state bar exam in February, Kristin Pagano will have spent more than $1,200 registering for the test and will have studied eight hours a day for months to commit to memory the case law and legal rules on everything from taxes to criminal procedure.

The 27-year-old, who lives in the north suburbs, will also be a brand-new mother to a baby girl, whom she plans to breast-feed.

Knowing how stressful the make-or-break bar exam is, Pagano, due to give birth in January, sought permission this month from the board that administers the test to stop the clock for the 20- to 30-minute breaks she thinks she will need to pump breast milk for her daughter during the three-hour sessions.

Pagano wasn’t seeking more time — but rather to be assured she wouldn’t lose the time she needs to extract the milk.

Now, as a former breast-feeding mom, I ought to be oozing sympathy with her. Nursing a one-month-old (she’s due in January) is no easy task, and, if she was actually at home nursing the child, depending on the situation (because not all babies are the same, and at different times, they go through growth spurts where they do need to nurse a lot), she could be feeding the baby as frequently as every 90 minutes.

But this is a one-time, breast-pumping situation — a need to, twice in a day, two days in a row, go for three hours between pumping times. (The exam is described as 3 hours of exam, a 1 hour break, and another 3 hours, for each of two days.) This is doable. A one month old does not, in fact, nurse constantly, and a woman’s breasts do not generally become intolerably engorged after a mere 3 hours, despite the quote the Trib offers:

According to Dr. Aloka Patel, a neonatologist at Rush University Medical Center, an infant eats every two to three hours, sometimes as often as every 90 minutes.

“If she is not pumping, the mother’s breasts would become engorged with milk, which is very painful and would impact her ability to concentrate,” said Patel, who does research in lactation.

Note that Patel doesn’t offer a time frame. Yes, if a woman doesn’t pump for hours and hours, this would be a serious problem, but three hours shouldn’t be a problem. She’s probably more at risk of having a baby who won’t take a bottle at this young age, than anything else. And stopping the clock, leaving the room, resuming, requiring additional proctoring for the added time, is likely to cause problems, too, both for the other exam-takers, and even for herself, to the extent that it disrupts her own concentration.

And, as far as I can tell, as far as Pagano and her supporters are concerned, it’s about the principle of the thing, establishing the right to accomodations that take away any inconvenience brought about by motherhood, rather than a serious medical need.

(On the other hand: my experience with Society of Actuaries exams is that a “three hour” exam often lasts much longer than that, when time is added for check-in, for instructions to be read, for passing out and collecting materials, and other administrative tasks. So one simple accomodation could be to skip all the preliminaries and report when the exam actually does start, if this is an issue.)

Is it a big deal? No. If it is customary to provide accomodations for multiple reasons, there is likewise no reason not to grant the accomodation.

But the irony is that the concept underlying this accomodation — that a woman who’s breastfeeding is tied to her child or her pump, and can’t even make it for short periods of time without pumping or nursing — if established, will do more harm to the cause than good, as it deters other women from even having a go at it because the burdens are too great.

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accomodations

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