This Woman Experienced the Actual Nightmare of Any Mom Who Has Ever Pumped Breast Milk

Supplying your baby with enough breast milk can feel like a full-time job. And when you're a working mom who wants nothing more than to make sure her kid is benefiting from that "liquid gold," it's easy to feel like every free moment you get should be dedicated to hitting the pump. A working mom named Jessica Coakley Martinez has been there a lot recently, as she's been traveling all over Europe on a 15-day work trip. Martinez has an 8-month-old son at home who she had only given breast milk up until this trip, and while touring eight different cities, she made sure to pump whenever she could. All in all, she accumulated 500 ounces of breast milk — which she said on Facebook she had to dump while going through security at Heathrow Airport last night.

In Martinez's "An Open Letter to Aviation Security in Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport," she explained exactly what lead up to this point, and it's absolutely infuriating.

[facebook ]https://www.facebook.com/jessica.coakley.96/posts/10154701974891124" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="true" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture; web-share">​

"Being a working mother is the hardest thing I've ever done," Martinez shared. "Trying to manage the logistics of drop-offs and pick-ups and conference calls and meetings and finding the time and energy to make sure both your family and work are getting ample amounts of your care and attention is both challenging and fulfilling, but mostly extremely exhausting and stressful.  ...  For months I pumped and froze milk during the day and in the middle of the night to feed my son with the hopes I would have enough to see him through my time away, but eventually I had to deal with the sense of failure I felt when I realized it wouldn't be enough to nourish him while I traveled, and thus I would have to introduce formula. Formula is perfectly acceptable (I clearly give it to my son), but as we had established a good breastfeeding relationship, it was my first choice and priority. I had also breastfed my first son until a year, so I wanted to give my second son the same."

So she explained "to help ease the personal guilt," she jumped at every chance she could to pump during this trip — "between meetings, presentations, business lunches and dinners, taxis, flights, and long waits in airports."

"It meant going to each hotel and convincing them to store my giant insulated bags of milk in their restaurant freezers to preserve it," Martinez wrote. "It meant lugging this giant block of frozen breast milk through four countries, airports and security checkpoints and having them pull out every single ounce of breastmilk and use mildly inappropriate sign language to convey 'breast' and 'milk' so that they would let me through. Which they did. Every one of them." ​Except​ for Heathrow.

"You made me dump nearly 500oz of breastmilk in the trash," she addressed aviation security at the London airport. "You made me dump out nearly two weeks worth of food for my son." 

That is a crazy-huge amount of breast milk to have to pump while traveling — and a devastating amount to have to ditch.

Martinez acknowledged that she should have looked up the rules. Heathrow's website explains that passengers can take only one liquid bag per person aboard planes, and each individual container within the bag must have a max capacity of no more than 100ml (or a little more than 3 ounces). Liquids in containers over that amount are not permitted through security. The only exception is if you are traveling with your baby. "If you are not travelling with a baby or infant, excess liquids should be carried as hold luggage," the regulation states.

Of the 500 ounces Martinez had in tow, 300 was frozen solid. And after letting go of 200 ounces of liquid milk, Martinez thought rest would be OK. Nope. She wrote that security officials told her it could "melt and become a liquid." 

She wrote that she then offered to go back to put it in her checked baggage, but "that wouldn't work either according to you because I had crossed the border and the only way for me to check the bag now was to exit the airport and re-enter – which I was also willing to do. But you wouldn't give me the milk back – because now it was a 'non-compliant item' and needed to be confiscated. It was as if you were almost proud to deny me at every possible point of compromise."

Actress Alyssa Milano actually had a very similar experience she tweeted about last year. "@HeathrowAirport just took my pumped breast milk away. 10 ounces. Gone. Not okay," she posted. "They said they would let the pumped milk through if I had the baby with me. Why would I need to pump if I had the baby with me????"

Martinez's post has racked up sympathetic comments like one from a mom named Krista Catalano-Pietrafeso​ who said, "I literally just screamed NOOOOOOOOOO so loud I probably woke up the kids. I would give anything to give you a hug right now​." Another named Alisa Hurwitz wrote, "Jess, my heart broke for you reading this. Many of us know exactly how much time, work, love, planning, coordinating, time, energy, and effort going into pumping. For them to not to at least have treated you with one bit of understanding and humanity in unconscionable​."

Follow Maressa on Twitter.​