Don’t let the sensational headline fool you. This is just an administrative ruling that a breast pump is more like a bottle warmer (or indeed an orange juicer) than a wheel chair when it comes to qualifying expenses that you can use to reduce your income tax liability.

“You don’t NEED a pump to breastfeed.”

It sure as hell helps when you have to go back to work. Unless YOU were able to take your baby with you.

Plus, I actually did NEED a breast pump in order to breast feed. Initially, we had trouble with my son latching on and the only way he could get enough was if I pumped and gave him a bottle of expressed milk. Without the pump, I would have had to give up trying to breastfeed…instead I went on to nurse for over 10 months.

The evidence of the value in terms of overall impact on the health of babies (and mothers) is vast. Saying that an aid to that end is not “medical care” is splitting hairs at best. Not to mention that in the current economic environment every little bit helps the “working person.”

You’re still (or purposely) missing the point. How do you return to work AND continue to breast feed (which has been proven time and again to have great value medically speaking) under most circumstances that working mothers face WITHOUT one?

You don’t return to work til the kid is older…but that’s a whole OTHA issue…again…I don’t judge people’s choices, but I don’t expect to pay for them either, I just make statements. People do what they must.

I’m sure the IRS just assumes that women can manually express several ounces of milk into a funnel in the bathroom at work, no pump required :)

I was fortunate enough not to have to return to work until my son effectively weaned himself. I know, however that this is not the case for most people if they’re lucky enough to get leave in the first place. The answer isn’t going to be found in your not-my-problem attitude (with all due respect…I’ve read enough of your comments to see a trend) but in real changes in how we as a society view motherhood and its importance. Things like this become important in the context of making those changes.

You know what a good program would be? One that would allow people to save pre-tax dollars into an account they could use to live off of while a parent took an extended maternity leave (1-2 years)…the gov would provide job protection under the law and people could pay into a program, tax-free, interest-earning, to fund their leave…

sigh…….”Unless, as I mentioned, you have a medical problem with latching or whatever.” I think your situation would be covered under the “or whatever” part. A *medical situation*…sigh.

If you need a pump for medical reasons, your health insurance (including Medicaid) should pay for it, so the HSA/FSA should be irrelevant (and no one who is uninsured has an FSA). The only way you could include your pump on your FSA, assuming you’re one of the minority of people who have FSAs in the first place, would be if you knew you were pregnant and would need a pump before open enrollment in November, and budgeted for the $250 or whatever at that point, and then you would be able to buy the pump with pretax dollars. The number of people to whom this would apply is minuscule. This is really a silly argument.

Gretchen, you are pretty judgmental. Whatever makes you feel better, I guess.

It’s needlessly judgmental to blame the mothers rather than think about what pushes them to make the “choices” you so disapprove of. We don’t really have all that many choices. You imply that many mothers choose to leave their babies with someone else because they just don’t feel like mothering. There is no evidence for that, but plenty of evidence that mothers feel terrible about it and wish they could be with their children more. I think all too often people would rather not think about the reasons why we have the parenting crises we do. Just a sample: a still-broken healthcare system (thereby making a minor benefit like pretax savings accounts much more important than they should be), stagnant income growth over the past 30 years (while cost of living continues to rise) that have made 2 incomes necessary for most families to afford life in a decent school district. I could go on. Yes, I get why the IRS ruled the way it did. It’s probably right from a technical standpoint. I am saying that tax exemption is not really a solution for anything anyway. I think generally people don’t like to deal with tougher issues when it’s much easier to just blame women for their “choices.” I also think, by the way, that it makes no sense to say you don’t expect to pay for someone else’s choices. We all pay for other people’s choices, all the time. Curious that most people are fine with this when we’re paying, for example, a private insurance company for other people’s choices, but somehow a government program is just unacceptable.

I don’t think government programs are unacceptable. I actually proposed one. And, I’m not blaming women for their choices. Hopefully these choices are made by both men and women, both parents (or both same-sex parents, if that’s how you roll). All I am saying is that this particular bene doesn’t make sense…just like you say when you say “I get why the IRS ruled the way it did. It’s probably right from a technical standpoint. I am saying that tax exemption is not really a solution for anything anyway”
Here’s another view that I feel aligned with: http://bfmed.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/why-i%E2%80%99m-conflicted-about-breast-pumps-and-flexible-spending-accounts/