Many parents of infants have decided that “breast is best.” What they haven’t agreed on is where and when breast-feeding is appropriate, or even acceptable.

In past months, women have been chastised for nursing at a water park, a library and a Georgia church. The feeding practice that’s encouraged (some would say pushed) by hospitals, pediatricians and fellow parents doesn’t always meet with approval when it goes public.

So when a student objected to Adrienne Pine, an American University anthropology professor, who brought a sick baby to the first day of her “Sex, Gender & Culture” class rather than cancel, and nursed the baby when she grew fussy, many onlookers seized on what appeared to be yet another instance of a woman being unfairly criticized for feeding her child.

The result has been a far-ranging debate about etiquette, the needs of working mothers and how the much-lauded practice of breast-feeding tethers a woman to an infant in ways that can be incompatible with work.

It’s a fascinating discussion, but the more I consider it, the more it feels like the question of whether a professor can nurse her baby in front of a classroom isn’t really a question that needs an answer.

Professor Pine’s dilemma is in some ways common, and in others, very specific to her personal circumstances. She is a single mother, making use of a day care with a no-sick-kids policy, and the first day of class has particular requirements for students, who, she says in describing why she made the choice she did, use the discussion and description that’s offered on that day to decide whether or not to drop a class (as, incidentally, the student who complained publicly about the professor’s nursing eventually did).

The number of students who choose to take or drop her class will almost certainly factor into her eventual job evaluations, her career and her paycheck. That day, of all days, taking advantage of a teaching assistant or her university’s willingness to allow her to reschedule classes seemed impossible.

The fact that her baby was nursing wasn’t her problem. The fact that there was no other way to deal with the baby was.

Ironically, in participating with Pine in The Huffington Post’s roundtable live discussion about the question of breast-feeding in public, Rachel Papantonakis (who organized a nurse-in on Capitol Hill over the summer to promote breast-feeding awareness) effectively illustrated the reason many women feel the professor made the wrong choice: Babies, whether nursing or not, are often distracting, and they’re nearly invariably unprofessional. Papantonakis’ infant son cries and fusses throughout the half-hour-long discussion (via Skype), making it difficult to hear or follow the speakers and limiting her participation.

But in being his ordinary distracting self, the baby highlights why the real issue here isn’t whether Pine should have nursed her baby in front of her class on a single, relatively unusual day in the course of her flexible teaching career. Babies and small children, nursing or not, require full-time attention, and working parents — particularly single working parents, like Pine — need help and support in providing that care.

The rhetoric of “personal responsibility” means little when the baby is sick and your boss is on the phone. Pine had a choice, if not a great one, available to her. Thousands of parents who wake up to this same dilemma every day don’t.

Pine’s bared breast is a red herring. It’s not the fact that she nursed her daughter in class that matters, but the fact that she could see no alternative to bringing her at all.

Most parents can’t choose to bring a child along and risk a few hours of distraction. Instead, the hourly employee can choose to lose wages, or to look for another job if her employer won’t accept another absence.

The attorney can rearrange a court date and lose nothing but some small element of her reputation. The hospital administrator can call an expensive emergency nanny. All of them will feel the weight of yet another small, incremental moment when parenthood seems to want to push you right out of the work force.

The right to bring a child to work when necessary, or even the right to nurse her without criticism once there, isn’t what most parents need. It’s options (options, in another ironic turn, that Professor Pine usually has), whether for workplace flexibility or child care, that ensure that fewer parents feel they don’t really have much choice.

Contact KJ Dell-Antonia at:

kj.dellantonia@nytimes.com