The aim:
Let’s ask airlines to allow breastfeeding women space in the hold for expressed milk free of charge.

The facts about expressed milk:

• When separated from it’s mother, a breastfed baby needs access to up to 1L a day of milk expressed by it’s mother.
• When separated from her baby, a breastfeeding mother must express milk in order to for her body to maintain it’s ability to breastfeed. 
• Expressing milk is a time consuming affair. Generally women express at a lesser volume output than a baby takes when breastfeeding. This means that it can take up to five days for a woman to express enough milk to feed her baby for one day.
• Therefore if a breastfeeding woman is travelling for work or personal reasons without her baby for any period longer than a few hours, she has no choice but to express milk and to transport this milk home to either feed her baby or, crucially, to replenish her store of expressed milk to allow for future trips away. If this does not happen a healthy store of expressed milk will very quickly become depleted and replenishing supplies can take weeks.
• Thus it is imperative that breastfeeding mothers are able to transport milk between destinations. 

The facts about travelling:

• Women, including breastfeeding women, need to travel for work, family and social commitments. 
• When travelling without her baby a breastfeeding mother is only allowed to transport 1000ml of milk (in individual 100ml containers) through security as part of her normal liquids allowance. This is only enough milk to feed a baby for  one day.  Details of hand luggage restrictions can be found  here.
• This leaves the breastfeeding mother no choice but to check a bag for her milk into the hold at a cost of between £15 and £75 per one-way flight in the UK. 
• The cost implication of this is huge for breastfeeding mothers travelling even just once or twice a month for work or other reasons.
• It also means that airlines are profiting from women forced to pay a high premium for hold space just to be able to transport expressed milk. 
• The situation has led to instances such as this this and this, where woman have been forced to dump huge volumes of milk that they have spent huge amounts of time expressing. 

The solution:
Let’s ask airlines to allow breastfeeding women space in the hold for expressed milk free of charge.