Parking While Breastfeeding Costs Pair Pretty Penny

Crying over spilled milk

When a hungry infant cries, a mother's first instinct is to feed her child. That's what Marta Lily did -- and all she got was a parking ticket for her troubles. 

Knowing their 6-month-old son needed to be fed, Enrique Velez and Lily parked their car on East 27th Street – an area they acknowledge is a no-standing zone -- so Lily could feed her boy, Nathan, whose eyes were damp with tears shed from hunger, according to a published report.

Velez sprinted to his nearby office to microwave a bottle of formula to give the child in addition to his wife's breast milk – but got held up when the phone rang, reports The New York Times.

By the time he returned to the car where he left his wife and infant son, a traffic enforcement agency was issuing a ticket. The time was only about 2:40 p.m. on July 30; the no-standing zone allegedly wasn't supposed to take effect for 20 minutes.

Desperate for a reprieve, Velez and his wife entreated the agent to reconsider writing the ticket, given their special circumstances. Bystanders even began to gather around the vehicle to supplement the case of the pleading parents.

All their effort was for naught.

"He didn't care," Velez told the Times. "We were not blocking anybody. It's not like we had to move. There were not even cars."

The Paper of Record even notes that if you plug in the couple's violation number -- No. 7893710330 -- on the Department of Finance Web site you can see the evidence of their tribulations firsthand.

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