  Especially in the earliest weeks after birth, but throughout the course of breastfeeding, shirts, sheets, and undergarments are often soaked in breastmilk. A baby's clothes are often soiled with spit-up breastmilk. And again, especially in the earliest weeks after birth, but throughout the course of raising children, parents are lucky to find time one day out of every few weeks to do the laundry.
Consequently, the laundry pile turns into an ant magnet. In fact, ants in the laundry are a strikingly common problem among families. While the easiest solution is a call to the exterminator, remember that pesticides, even the so-called natural pyrethren-based ones, are hazardous chemicals. A baby or child's considerably lower body weight means that toxicities affect them exponentially more than they affect adults.
It's especially important to avoid pesticides when children are in the house. In addition to avoiding sprays that suspend in the air and then breathed into the body, pesticides on the floors are also dangerous. Residue on the floor can be absorbed through the skin, as our skin's absorption rate can be as high as 60%. Ant bate is probably the ecologically safest pesticide because the hazardous chemicals are confined to one container that is removable, and the poison is limited to the carcass of the pest that consumed it. But even bate has its issues. The poison easily seeps into the groundwater, either through its passage into ant hills or its disposal in landfills. Unless your family's water comes from a well, polluting the water supply is a longterm problem that affects the community on the whole.
While it's harder to take community stewardship as seriously because, unlike the ants, this problem is abstract and distant, setting a discipline of stewardship in your family will help your children and grandchildren in future years immeasurably. The safest way to rid your laundry hamper of the ants is to stop putting milky clothes into the hamper. Instead, throw them directly into the washer, or keep a separate bag on the washer only for these items. If you can find the passage the ants are using to get to the laundry, seal it closed. If they are entering from a specific outside source, lure them away from the house with a compost pile.
Orange oil poured into an ant hill often irritates the ants enough to make them move their home, which isn't a permanent solution, but is as much as most chemical ant hill treatments will also accomplish. Luring ants to move their home to a location that's easier to co-exist with is a kinder, ecologically safer solution. Above all, remember that ant bites are not dangerous. As with mosquitoes, gnats, flies, and other small pests, their appearance in your home is alarming, but the invisible presence of chemicals is the actual threat to the family. 
