National Board of Medical Examiners won’t relent for breast-feeding mother


After five years of medical training, all that stands between Sophie Currier of Brookline and an elite, double-barreled MD-Ph D is a daylong exam and her commitment to breast - feeding her infant daughter.


Just another example of authoritarians who hold rules as fixed in time instead of considering the possibility that they - and their rules - are out of touch with reality.

She already has a doctorate from Harvard. Now, after five years of medical training, all that stands between Sophie Currier of Brookline and an elite, double-barreled MD-Ph D is a daylong exam and her commitment to breast - feeding her infant daughter.

For Currier to begin her medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital this fall as scheduled, she must pass the clinical knowledge exam run by the National Board of Medical Examiners by August. The exam is nine hours long and allows a total of only 45 minutes in breaks.

But Currier is still nursing her 7 -week-old daughter, Léa, and if she does not pump milk from her breasts every two or three hours, she could suffer blocked ducts, the discomfort of hard breasts, or an infection called mastitis.

When she called the board last week to ask for extra break time, she said she was told that the test provides special accommodations only for disabilities covered by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, and breast-feeding was not one of them.

This is dumber than the flight attendant expelling a nursing mother from a plane, last year. That was personal ignorance. This is official arrogance.

Posted: Sat - June 23, 2007 at 10:43 AM