IRS rules breast-feeding supplies deductible
Many parents are rejoicing in the new IRS ruling that now makes breast-feeding supplies deductible. This change in IRS law allows families to get reimbursed for breast-feeding supplies via pre-tax funds from their flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts, according to MSNBC.
Reversing a position that the IRS has long enforced, breast pumps and other supplies that directly relate to breast-feeding will be considered medical expenses and therefore will be tax-deductible.
Helping with the hefty expense
Lactation supplies can be very expensive. Breast pumps can cost $200 or more. Combined with other necessary lactation supplies, such as breast pads and bottles for storing milk or use when the mother is not physically present, parents may end up spending hundreds of dollars in the first year of breast-feeding their new baby. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) encourages breast-feeding whenever possible, despite the cost.
A healthy deduction
The AAP reached out to the IRS, hoping to help new parents cope with the expense of a new baby. The organization asked the IRS to allow a breast-feeding deduction in order to encourage mothers to feed their children naturally. Initially, the agency denied that request. Pleading their case again, the AAP told of the various health benefits of breast-feeding, including reports proving that “children who are breast-fed have lower rates of mortality, meningitis, some types of cancers, asthma and other respiratory illnesses, bacterial and viral infections, ear infections, juvenile diabetes, some chronic liver diseases, allergies and obesity.”
Surgeon General
In January 2011, U.S. Surgeon General Regina M. Benjamin issued a Call to Action to Support Breast-Feeding to promote and encourage mothers to breast-feed. The surgeon general’s action plan asks for more supportive community and hospital-based breast-feeding education programs and encourages an increase in and expansion of community programs.
Other areas covered by the action plan are a push to offer mothers peer support and counseling, and better lactation education for health-care workers. The plan also asks for a ”firmer commitment from employers to offer lactation support programs, paid maternity leave, and break time and private space for moms to express breast milk,” says Parenting.com.
How to qualify and receive the tax break
It is possible to get reimbursed for supplies if funds are taken from either one’s health savings accounts or flexible spending accounts. But NPR warns that is isn’t exactly easy to get a breast-feeding deduction on your tax form. Parents need to have medical expenses that make up more than 7.5 percent of their income to declare the tax deduction in April.
Breast-feeding awareness
Raising awareness of the beneficial properties of breast-feeding is an ongoing task. While medical professionals extol the health benefits of mother’s milk and work to change the public's view, many people still lean told historical societal norms and consider breast-feeding somehow offensive or something that should be hidden.
For example, the Washington Post reports of a recent incident where a nursing mother, Noriko Aita, was asked by a security guard in the Smithsonian's Hirschorn Museum to leave a bench where she was nursing her daughter and move to the women's restroom.
Ever since the “Right to Breast-feed Act,” instituted in 1999, there has been a law that gives women the legal right to breast-feed on any federal property open to the public. “Lactivists” planned a "nurse-in” at the museum to showcase their “federally protected right to nourish their babies in public,” according to the Post.
The new ruling by the IRS is right in line with current action by the surgeon general and ongoing requests by a variety of medical associations to encourage breast-feeding for a nation of healthier children.
