A woman has filed a complaint with German police alleging she was told to squeeze her breast at airport security to prove she was lactating.

Gayathiri Bose told the BBC she was “humiliated” by the experience and would explore formal legal action.

She said police at Frankfurt Airport were suspicious because she was carrying a breast pump but travelling without her baby.

German police declined to comment to the BBC on the specific allegations.

But they said such measures were “clearly” not part of routine procedure.

Ms Bose, who was travelling alone, said she was on her way to board a flight to Paris last Thursday when she was stopped at the security screening station.

The 33-year-old Singaporean said that after her carry-on bag, which contained her breast pump, went through the X-ray machine, she was taken aside for questioning.

“[They had] an incredulous tone. ‘You are breastfeeding? Then where is your baby? Your baby is in Singapore?’,” she said.

Ms Bose said the officers did not seem to believe her when she insisted the device was a breast pump.

They kept her passport and she was then led to a room by a female police officer for further questioning, she said.

Image copyright GAYATHIRI BOSE

Inside the room, the police officer asked her to prove she was lactating, claimed Ms Bose.

“She asked me to open up my blouse and show her my breast. She then asked how come I didn’t have anything attached to my breast, if I was lactating and expressing breastmilk,” said Ms Bose.

“And I said, there is no such thing that is [permanently] attached, we usually place the pump to our nipple and the machine does the job.

“She wanted me to show her by hand-expressing a little.”

Ms Bose said she complied and squeezed her breast. “I was just in shock, I was going through the motions. I was all by myself as well, and wasn’t sure what would happen to me if they decided to make trouble for me.”

“It was only when I came out of the room that I began to slowly understand what had just happened. I just started to cry, I was terribly upset.”

She said officials then tested and cleared the pump before returning her passport, and she was allowed to board her plane to Paris. Ms Bose asked for the name of the female officer, who wrote it on a piece of paper.

Ms Bose said the incident, which lasted for nearly 45 minutes, was “humiliating” and “very traumatising”.

“When they finally cleared me of the matter, I told them that this is not the way to treat someone. I said ‘Do you know what you just did to me, you made me show my breast.’

“The officer just said, ‘Okay it is over now, please go’. She was totally nonchalant, she didn’t seem very remorseful or empathetic.”

Ms Bose, a manager at a transport company who has a three-year-old child and a seven-month-old baby, said she was exploring the possibility of taking formal legal action.

“While I do respect the need to do security checks on items that may seem suspicious, to outrage a person’s modesty is definitely crossing the line.”

Christian Altenhofen, spokesman for the German federal police unit at Frankfurt Airport, told the BBC that he could not comment on the incident “for reasons of data protection”.

He added: “If a suspected explosive is detected at an air safety control point, the baggage and the person must be searched.

“The measures you have described for a breastfeeding mother are clearly not included.

Aviation expert Ellis Taylor from aviation publication Flightglobal said asking a mother to show she was lactating was “pretty ridiculous”.

“This is not normal. There are some people representing authority who do overstep the mark, but that to me sounds unprecedented and quite frankly very humiliating.”

He said the usual protocol in such a situation would involve an X-ray, followed by a check for traces of explosives on the item.

Officers may also ask the passenger to switch on the breast pump to show it works.

“But to hold an interrogation to demonstrate the passenger has a need for this device is bizarre. What if it were a man transporting the device? He would not be able to show he’s lactating,” said Mr Taylor.

Trump has been trying to govern by impulse, on whim, for personal retribution, for profit, by decree ― as if he had been elected dictator. It doesn’t work, and the wheels are coming off the bus. After a week!

Impeachment is gaining ground because it is the only way to get him out, and because Republicans are already deserting this president in droves, and because the man is psychiatrically incapable of checking whether something is legal before he does it.

Impeachment is gaining ground because it’s so horribly clear that Trump is unfit for office. The grownups around Trump, even the most slavishly loyal ones, spend half their time trying to rein him in, but it can’t be done.

They spend the other half fielding frantic calls from Republican chieftains, business elites and foreign leaders. Trump did what? Poor Reince Priebus has finally attained the pinnacle of power, and it can’t be fun.

It is one thing to live in your own reality when you are a candidate and it’s just words. You can fool enough of the people enough of the time maybe even to get elected. But when you try to govern that way, there is a reality to reality—and reality pushes back.

One by one, Trump has decreed impulsive orders, un-vetted by legal, policy, or political staff, much less by serious planning. Almost immediately he is forced to walk them back by a combination of political and legal pressure—and by reality.

Unlike in the various dictatorships Trump admires, the complex skein of constitutional legal and political checks on tyranny in the United States are holding—just barely at times, but they are holding. And the more reckless Trump’s behavior, the stronger become the checks.

Only with his lunatic effort to selectively ban refugees (but not from terrorist-sending countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt where Trump has business interests) has Trump discovered that the American system has courts. It has courts. Imagine that.

The more unhinged he becomes, the less will conservative judges be the toadies to ordinary Republican policies that they too often have been. Anybody want to wager that the Supreme Court will be Trump’s whore?

In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting his view of Putin. They have ridiculed his screwball claim of massive voter fraud.

They are running for cover on how to kill ObamaCare without killing patients or Republican re-election hopes. This is actually complicated, and nuance is not Trump’s strong suit. Rep Tom McClintock of California spoke for many when he warned:

“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, said Rep. Tom McClintock. (R-Calif.)

“That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, mocking Trump’s own nutty tweeting habits, sent out a tweet calling a trade war with Mexico “mucho sad.”

Trump’s own senior staff has had to pull him back from his ludicrous crusade against Mexico and Mexicans, where Trump forces the Mexican president to cancel an official visit one day, and spends an hour on the phone kissing up the next day.

Trump proposed to reinstate torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the Senate’s third ranking Republican said Wednesday that the ban on torture was settled law and the Republicans in Congress would oppose any reinstatement. Trump’s own defense secretary holds the same view. After blustering out his new torture policy, Trump meekly agreed to defer to his defense advisers.

All this in just a week! Now capped by federal judges starting to rein him in.

Two weeks ago, in this space, just based on what we witnessed during the transition, I wrote a piece calling for a citizens impeachment panel, as a shadow House Judiciary Committee, to assemble a dossier for a Trump impeachment, and a citizens’ campaign to create a public impeachment movement.

In the two weeks since then, Free Speech for People has launched a citizens’ campaign to impeach Trump. About 400,000 people have already signed the impeachment petition. 

The bipartisan group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, (CREW) has been conducting a detailed investigation. Senior legal scholars associated with CREW have filed a detailed legal brief in their lawsuit, documenting the several ways Trump is in violation of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits a president from profiting from the actions of foreign governments.

There are already plenty of other grounds for impeachment, including Trump’s putting his own business interests ahead of the country’s and his weird and opportunistic alliance with Vladimir Putin bordering on treason. A lesser-known law that goes beyond the Emoluments Clause is the STOCK Act of 2012, which explicitly prohibits the president and other officials from profiting from non-public knowledge.

Impeachment, of course, is a political as well as a legal process. The Founders designed it that way deliberately. But after just a week in office, not only has Trump been deserting the Constitution; his partisan allies are deserting him.

Despite his creepy weirdness, Republicans at first thought they could use Trump for Republican ends. But from his embrace of Putin to his sponsorship of a general trade war, this is no Republican. One can only imagine the alarm and horror being expressed by Republicans privately.

In 1984, the psychiatrist Otto Kernberg described a sickness known as Malignant Narcissism. Unlike ordinary narcissism, malignant narcissism was a severe pathology.

It was characterized by an absence of conscience, a pathological grandiosity and quest for power, and a sadistic joy in cruelty.

Given the sheer danger to the Republic as well as to the Republicans, Trump’s impeachment will happen. The only question is how grave a catastrophe America faces first.

*Article by Robert Kuttner co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School first published in Huffington’s Post.

Doctors are being told not to call pregnant women ‘mothers’ – over fears they might offend transgender people.

The British Medical Association – the trade union and professional body for doctors in the UK – has issued the advice in official guidelines issued to its 160,000 members who work in hospitals and general practice across the UK.

It has told them that mums-to-be should be called ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.

The claims made by the Mail on Sunday come just a week after it emerged that a Brit who is undergoing a sex change from a woman to a man has put the operation on hold to have a baby.

In what’s believed to be the first case of its kind in the UK, Hayden Cross, 20, who is legally male and has received hormone treatment, has been revealed to be four-months pregnant.

Some 775,000 women give birth in Great Britain every year – and there are no other known cases of transgender people having babies.

The contentious advice from the BMA to insist members drop the word ‘mother’ to avoid offending transgender people – and to ‘celebrate diversity’ – is in a 14-page booklet called A Guide To Effective Communication: Inclusive Language In The Workplace.

It states: “A large majority of people that have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women. However, there are some intersex men and trans men who may get pregnant.

“We can include intersex men and trans men who may get pregnant by saying “pregnant people” instead of “expectant mothers”.”

The guide also tells doctors not use the terms “born man” or “born woman” in relation to transgender people – as it claims these phrases “are reductive and over-simplify a complex subject”.

Senior executive Dr Anthea Mowat writes on the BMA website: “I would encourage you all to read and share this guide, and think about how you can apply it in your day-to-day work.

“This is a time where we need to come together to support and protect our colleagues and our patients.”

A spokesman for the BMA insisted to MirrorOnline however this morning: “This document is produced by the BMA for BMA staff and representatives on promoting an inclusive workplace at the BMA, not in the NHS.

“This is not ‘official guidelines’ to doctors on how to treat or address patients.”

Women’s campaigner Laura Perrins criticised the BMA’s advice as “anti-science, anti-women and anti-mother”.

She told the Mail on Sunday: “As every doctor knows only females can have children. To say otherwise is offensive and dangerous.

“This will offend women up and down the country, and is an example of the majority of women being insulted for a tiny minority of people.”

Conservative MP Philip Davies described the guidance as “completely ridiculous” – adding: “If you can’t call a pregnant woman an expectant mother, then what is the world coming to?’”

Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, told the MoS: “I think it is sad that society is being pushed in this direction.

“God has made us man and woman, and mothers relate to their children in different ways than fathers.

“This ruling will confuse people about the vital role of mothers in bringing up their children.”

The BMA’s official response in a statement is: “This is a guide for BMA staff and representatives aimed at promoting an inclusive workplace at the BMA.

“It is not workplace guidance for doctors, which is clear from the fact it does not refer to patients.”