The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.

A woman said she was booted out of a moms Facebook group after challenging those who shared photo shoots of their newborns and children with signs that read "My First Pandemic." Things then got heated.

Exclusive Pumping Mamas is a group created for women "to discuss feeding pumped/expressed breastmilk through bottles," its page description reads. The closed group currently has over 30,000 members.



Holiday Bartelt, a 31-year-old mother who lives in Elgin, Illinois, told BuzzFeed News she believes she was blocked from the group "for disagreeing [with using] a global crisis as a photo op with babies."

"An infant in Chicago has died by COVID-19 now ... Is it still cute?" she asked. She was referring to the death of a 9-month-old child in Cook County, the first reported infant death in the US connected to the virus. "I pray these women don't feel that pain."

Bartelt said she started noticing more and more of these kinds of photo shoots being shared by mothers on social media over the past week, and was baffled.



"I honestly didn't understand why people were making these pictures," she said. "I've never seen anything like this before."



"My neighbor recently alerted me that she is suspected of having COVID-19. She has three young children that she can't see, a husband she can't hug, two little pups she can't even pet. All because she was instructed to self-quarantine herself," said Bartelt. "That hit too close to home."

So, she felt the need to say something.

At first, she simply commented that she found the photos of cute kids propped next to toilet paper, Lysol bottles, and Clorox wipes to be "inappropriate." However, things quickly escalated.



At one point, according to Bartelt, she challenged a woman who posted her child's photo shoot with a sign that read "Not my first pandemic, survived H1N1 2009." She then facetiously "asked her if [her child] hadn't survived if she would have posted a picture of him in a coffin."

"She said 'yes,' and that she was worthless for this argument because I would not change her mind," Bartelt said of the woman she was in the spat with. "I agreed she was worthless."

Bartelt said that at some point after, she no longer had access to the Facebook group.

When reached, the admin and founder of the group, Amanda Glenn, confirmed that Bartelt was in fact kicked out — however, not for sharing her thoughts, but for "being rude."

"The default response when someone is rude to one of us is usually to kick them out and block them because we strive to keep the group positive," Glenn told BuzzFeed News.

Glenn added that she agrees the photos are "not in the best taste," and that she and other admins and moderators have started "declining posts with pandemic pics as of this past weekend."

