A letter writer in a non-travel magazine I get has sent out a desperate call for advice. She’s a businesswoman who travels a lot, but who also has toddlers and babies at home. Her problem? She’s devoted to giving her kids breast milk, and is having a hard time finding places in airports where she can use a pump to express milk.

I don’t know how much play this issue gets in other countries, but in America breastfeeding has moved from a silent battle of wills to the forefront of what is idiotically dubbed “The Mommy Wars.” And there’s practically no place it’s more important than while traveling — whether traveling for work or pleasure, a mother’s got to feed her kids.

While the actual act of nursing has received increasing support, as demonstrated by the incredibly effective nurse-in lactivist conventions held in 2006 when an airline crew in Vermont kicked a breastfeeding mother off a flight for refusing to cover her baby with a blanket, there is very little space or opportunity given for women to express milk using a breast pump while traveling.

I won’t dwell on the overwhelming benefits of breast milk over formula (like the fact that formula-fed babies are at least twice as likely to suffer later from asthma, respiratory infections, and allergies; and breastfed babies have been shown to have score about 8 points higher on IQ tests). And as for breastfeeding while traveling, fellow blogger Sheila has a great post on her Family Travel site about how easy and stress-free it is. (Note: if Family Travel gives you a message that the internal links are borked, just type “lactivist” into the search function to find the post.)

What’s important here is that attaching yourself to a pump is really hard work. I had to do it for a month straight when my son was first born, and it’s no fun at all. It’s uncomfortable and time consuming; it requires more space than just popping the baby on (what my husband terms Glug-a-Jug, as if Hooters had opened a milk bar); it looks weird if you have to do it in public; and, if you’re stressed or pressured, it’s actually more difficult to produce enough milk to feed the baby when you get back home. And you have to do it every 3-4 hours or you’ll seriously regret it, which pretty much covers most check-in-and-wait times at major airports.

But women do it because they know how much their kids need it. Breast milk is, after all, the best nutrition on the planet. And it seems that societies that profess to put families and children foremost should provide places where a traveling mother can hide out in peace and quiet and pump away.

Public bathrooms don’t cut it. As my mother-in-law points out, parents shouldn’t even have to change their babies in those places, which are unsanitary and cumbersome. That goes double for pumping breast milk, when it’s essential that you keep the bottles and other equipment sterile.

I’ve done some searching since I read the woman’s plea for help, and have no good answers. Women are advised to make sure they have all their parts with them and pre-sterilized, and are cautioned to advise security that they’re sending a pump through because some nursing mothers have been stopped when their pumps looked like bombs. One woman says she just used the family restroom, but had to check both milk (in freezer packs) and pump and the pump ended up damaged.

Now that I’m looking to travel with a baby, I look at airports in a whole new light, and it seems to me that they are still overwhelmingly set up to cater to male business travelers and university students on their first I’m-discovering-myself-in-Cambodia backpacking tour. What I’d really love to see are worldwide airport branches of Mom’s Breastaurant (a kiosk that currently focuses on outdoor sports and fair-type events), but for now a clean, quiet room would do.