Taking a 10-minute break to tap out a bottle of breast milk isn’t hard for Nancy Burns, an attorney at the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission.

She has a windowless office with a door. The electric machine she uses comes with a refrigeration compartment, where she can store the bottle of express milk in ice packs. Burns pumps every work day at 10 a.m. and then delivers the bottle to her 1-year-old daughter’s baby-sitter at lunch.

“From a medical perspective, it’s recommended,” she said, citing the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guideline that women breast-feed for at least the child’s first year of life. “The immunological benefits are huge for the child.”

Burns knows of nursing mothers at the PRC, however, who must pump breast milk in the bathroom because they don’t have private offices. That’s why she’s glad a new state law will require both public and private employers to create a clean place for breast pumping near a mother’s work station but not inside a bathroom. The law went into effect Friday.

“It’s sort of interesting how humiliated women are,” Burns said. “Women are so self-conscious to even ask for accommodations that would have been provided.”

Bathrooms are not a good place for lactation at work because they are neither sanitary nor private — unless you have a manual pump that can be used in the stall, but then sanitary problems only get worse.

“Would you go into the bathroom to make your child a sandwich?” said Sharon Giles-Pullen, a member of the New Mexico Breastfeeding Task Force, a subcommittee of the New Mexico Pediatric Society that lobbied for the legislation.

Similar laws can be found in 13 other states. New Mexico already has a law that protects the right of a woman to nurse in public.

Mothers who nurse a baby at work or use a breast pump at work have breast-feeding rates similar to those of mothers not working, Giles-Pullen said, citing one New Mexico study.

Lissa Knudse, a doctoral student at The University of New Mexico and the mother of a 2-year-old girl, helped write the law, which was based on a California statute. She wants New Mexico to be a place where being a dedicated worker doesn’t have to “trump” being a dedicated mother. She’s happy to see that UNM has since allocated five lactation stations on campus.

Breast-feeding women who don’t empty their breasts during the day are at risk for infections and other complications, advocates say. The average pumping session takes 20 minutes, and under the new law, workers won’t get paid during that time.

Soon, the New Mexico Breastfeeding Task Force will post on its Web site suggestions for how employers can implement the law. It also will try to establish legal assistance for nursing mothers who run into problems with compliance at their workplace.

“I always think of restaurant workers,” Giles-Pullen said about how the law might be challenging for some employers to carry out.

She suggested lactating mothers could get permission to use the restaurant’s break room and hang a notice on the doorknob that says, “Please do not disturb. I’m providing a healthy future for my baby.”

Or, in tighter circumstances, it might have to be a storage closet that has been rearranged, she said.

Ideally, any location would be equipped with an electrical outlet and a chair or a stool.

Small offices with cubicles might be able to purchase a screen that could be placed in front of a women’s desk, she said. The breast pump machine isn’t usually noisy, but a working mother might want to hang a sign that says, “I need some privacy; I’m pumping.”

Each state government office, meanwhile, must sort out how to respond to the law.

“We are leaving implementation (of the law) up to the discretion of the agencies in order to meet the specific conditions of each place of employment,” State Personnel Office spokesman Sean Fitting said.

In general, breast-feeding rates in New Mexico are pretty good — with 78 percent of moms initiating breast-feeding in 2005, according to Giles-Pullen. But within six months, only 46 percent of all women who delivered babies were still breast-feeding. And a mere 27 percent continued through 12 months.

That drop-off is likely due, in part, to the demands of working.

Pumping gets a big push in New Mexico. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for New Mexico Women, Infants and Children — which sees 60 percent of all infants — gives a $250 electric breast pump to each mother, said Giles-Pullen, manager of the state Health Department’s WIC breast-feeding promotion program.

But in a survey of 2,000 New Mexico women in 2004, 20 percent said it was difficult to use breaks or find a place to pump or breast-feed at work or at school, according to The New Mexico Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System.

Nonetheless, 44 percent of mothers working or in school were breast-feeding.

“It’s really important for mothers to be with their infants,” Burns said. “It’s way more important than going to work, but you have to pay the bills.”

Contact Diana Del Mauro at 986-3066 or dianadm@sfnewmexican.com.