I feel the need to begin this with a caveat: I’m a mom and I was a working mom when my daughter was an infant. So, I have a fair amount of empathy for moms who are doing their best to juggle working and mothering, and I recognize that sometimes, that may mean being creative and resourceful, particularly when it comes to breastfeeding because babies (and breasts) don’t operate on the same timetable as most jobs. What that doesn’t mean is: failing to do your job, failing to communicate and confirm you have permission to step away (if need be) before doing so, or abandoning your post when you’re tasked with guarding the lives and safety of others.
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What, you may wonder, prompted me to share this? Well, this incredibly mindboggling story broken by Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics:
The tweet reads in full:
EXCLUSIVE and BREAKING: During a Donald Trump visit to North Carolina yesterday, a woman Secret Service special agent abandoned her post to breastfeed with no permission/warning to the event site agent, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.
Shortly before Trump’s motorcade arrival — I’m told five minutes beforehand — the site agent was getting ready for the arrival. (The site agent is the person in charge of the entire event’s security.)
The site agent went to do one final sweep of the walking route and found the agent breast-feeding her child in a room that is supposed to be set aside for important Secret Service official work, i.e. a potential emergency related to the president.
A working agent on duty cannot bring a child to a protective assignment. The woman was out of the Atlanta Field Office.
The woman agent was in the room with two other family members.
The agent and her family members bypassed the Uniformed Division checkpoint and were escorted by an unpinned event staff into the room to breastfeed, the sources said. Unpinned means they have not been cleared by the Secret Service to be there.
When contacted about the incident, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the incident did not have an impact on the event. and it’s under review.
“All employees of the U.S. Secret Service are held to the highest standards,” he said. “While there was no impact to the North Carolina event, the specifics of this incident are being examined. Given this is a personnel matter, we are not in a position to comment further.”
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I’m not going to lie — I am gobsmacked by this. I am trying to wrap my brain around it. On what planet — in what universe — could someone who is trained for protective duty and whose job literally requires them to man (woman) a post conceivably think this is the appropriate way to handle the situation? It simply does not compute.
And it’s compounded by the stark reality that we are just one month past an assassination attempt on the protectee — former President Donald Trump — that came within a whisker of taking his life, following which the Secret Service has been under extraordinary scrutiny as we attempt to understand exactly what led to that cascade of failures. In other words, this agent’s — all agents’ — situational awareness and mindfulness as to proper protocols ought to be on heightened alert.
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I am the last person you’ll find in the camp of “Women should not serve in the Secret Service.” Clearly, women can and should serve — if they meet the requisite parameters for the roles they are tasked with completing. For instance, I do think it’s a fair argument that people of smaller stature (typically, women more so than men) ought not be tasked with physically guarding a protectee who’s larger than them — say, someone who’s 6’3″. But obviously, there are plenty of roles beyond physically surrounding protectees, like, oh, you know, guarding various entrances to events, i.e., standing post.
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You don’t leave your post. Not to use the bathroom, not to take a call, not to breastfeed your baby. If your circumstances are such that you cannot stand post, then you need to take that into account before accepting the gig. And if something happens unexpectedly that pulls you away, you alert someone — ideally your superior — immediately so that someone else can step in. Needing to breastfeed your infant isn’t an unexpected thing. It’s part and parcel of being the mother to a young infant. So, you don’t volunteer for or accept assignments that will place you in a situation where you can’t fulfill them. You just…don’t.
The “specifics of this incident” damn well better be “examined,” Mr. Guglielmi. As should the specifics of how your agency is run.