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Rep. Ángel Peña Ramírez, along with fellow New Progressive Party Reps. Joel Franqui Atiles, Vimarie Peña Dávila and Carmen Medina Calderón, on Tuesday filed House Bill 298, which would create the “Puerto Rico Breastfeeding Code.”
The measure, which would be applicable in both the public and private sectors, was submitted through the citizen petition mechanism by Nohemi D. Rodríguez Rosa.
According to the measure’s preamble, “the laws that protect the rights of nursing mothers are scattered. We urgently need to develop a code so that all people have easy access and that it is easy for everyone to understand. This matter requires this accessibility because, as they are scattered, sometimes some mothers are unaware of rights protected by other laws, which places them in a weaker position than the employer or the State.
“What is sought is to codify the current breastfeeding laws to collect them all in a single legal document and that they are organized and structured.”
Among the laws that would be in the new code are, among others, Law 427-2000; which regulates the period of breastfeeding or extraction of breast milk; Law 155-2002, which orders the secretaries of departments, executive directors of agencies, presidents of public corporations and directors and administrators of public instrumentalities of the central government to designate spaces for breastfeeding that safeguard the right to privacy of every nursing mother in the work areas; and Law No. 17-2005, which added a subsection (4) to Article 1A of Law 168 of May 4, 1949, as amended, which provides that “… every mother has the right to breastfeed her children in any place of public access, regardless of whether or not there are areas designated for breastfeeding in these places.”
The preamble adds that “[b]y codifying, the original laws are repealed and from now on, the corresponding article will be mentioned within the code that we intend to approve. Since they are codified, it is much easier to handle. Here we can find all the laws on the subject of breastfeeding that may affect a certain situation.”
