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I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.
La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty some have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.
La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."
So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:
Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:
Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."
Would these be the same 'norms of nature' that killed 40-50% of all pre-20th century children before their fifth birthday?
I think putting 'mothers breastfeeding their children' in the same category as cholera, dysentery and smallpox is a bridge too far.
Technical interventions that remove lethal diseases aren't the same as qualitative shifts in the operation.
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Doesn't pumping solve all 4 problems ?
Pumping only didn't work out in my ime, but we had a bunch of things that complicated the entire process. I remember reading some paper saying that mothers who try exclusive pumping fail to establish sufficient production more than mothers who breastfeed.
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If you prefer pumping every two hours day and night to cuddling a baby. But, also, it’s pretty hard to pump enough, since babies are more efficient after the first week or so, and they cluster feed to increase production. Mixed pumping and formula is, of course, an option, but less convenient, at night especially.
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My wife actually relied on LLL circa 2019 with our daughter. She had a lot of issues with latching and LLL helped, but unfortunately our doctors scared the crap out of my wife and talked her into pumping. After that started, the latch was basically permanently broken. This resulted in my wife being stuck pumping for hours a day while struggling with post partum. It served as a daily reminder that she wasn't having the breastfeeding relationship with our daughter that she had dreamed of. She sank into a pretty deep depression, and had a lot of feelings of inadequacy.
This is apparently not uncommon.
Damn, Post partum is rough. So easy for it to sneak in.
We humans really aren't made for nuclear existence huh. Can't imagine how women do it without a more traditionally-sized community.
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Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.
I'm well aware, which is why I said "not . . . quite as much . . . as" rather than "none at all."
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nearly two decades ago, I was introduced to the term "titalitarian" specifically in reference to the La Leche League's emphasis on breastfeading.
Fun, and barely relevant anecdote, I was born very premature, like so premature that it was unlikely I was going to survive. I'm told I also cried nonstop for milk but never could latch on. The La Leche consultant (Activist) was absolutely nasty to my mother about allowing me to be bottle fed. It didn't matter if I died to her as long as I was breast-fed. Sufficed to say she reduced my mother to tears and a breakdown and my father almost got arrested throwing the activist out. I can totally imagine these people as the sort of crusaders that then get infected with woke-beliefs, but this is very much leopard-eating-my-face for them.
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How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here? Are they doing big group lactation sessions and don't want men to see their breasts? Is it a budgetary issue? The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.
It may not be good for the babies. Hormones around childbirth and breastfeeding are fairly complex, and show up in the milk.
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Notably, there is no reason for including men. While men can be given drugs to cause lactation they cannot be mothers, even if they wear a dress and grow their hair out and insist on going by ‘she’. It is impossible for a man to give birth.
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The League was founded in part on specific concern for infant and maternal health and development. Men don't lactate without hormonal intervention (or, in some cases, cancer) and studies on the health impact of such choices are... not nonexistent, I suspect, but almost certainly some combination of weak, bad, or politically motivated. The difficulties a new mother might have with breastfeeding may have some overlap with the difficulties a lactating man might have, but there are no clear health or infant development reasons to help men who lactate, the way there definitely are with new mothers.
When you create an organization specifically to address women's issues with a natural feminine process, then "Men" clearly articulates a pretty damn specific objection. I assume there would also be frustration with women who present as masculine, if they keep trying to police the language of breastfeeding with absurd neologisms like "chestfeeding." If you make an organization dedicated to breastfeeding and a bunch of entryists show up to tell you to use a different word, failure to address that swiftly and unapologetically will probably result in, well, pretty much what the article describes.
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What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."
The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.
EDIT: Just to head off some potential misunderstandings caused by my imprecise phrasing: I'm not saying to turn yourself into an evil caricature. Don't make yourself adopt positions that you don't sincerely hold in the first place. What I meant was that, the ideal scenario would be, you lay out your position as honestly and truthfully as possible, and if you are then informed that your position is sexist/transphobic, etc, your response would be: "ok, point accepted. I am. Now let's move on to the actual substance of the issue."
Also very much recognized by the left.
A perennial question in online spaces is "Why do leftists spend so much time critiquing people who agree with them on 90% of issues when they could instead focus on people who disagree with them on 90% of issues?" and the answer, beyond standard narcissism of small differences, is that the people who disagree with them on 90% of issues usually aren't going to give a shit about their critiques or outrage.
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Okay! You go first.
Right, obviously I’m not going to do that! I didn’t say it was easy, or even feasible.
In fact when questions like “when will woke end?” or “what can we do to stop wokeness?” get raised on this forum, I’m usually in the position of being the bearer of bad news: wokeness might last for a very long time, and there’s probably nothing you can do as an individual in the near-term to hasten its downfall. There was probably nothing that any one individual could have done to hasten the end of communism in the USSR. If someone did speak out publicly, we might admire it as an individual act of heroism, but ultimately it would have accomplished nothing in historical terms. Deciding to arbitrarily burn all your social credit one day is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish anything. Probably you could make a bigger difference by staying under the radar and putting your talents to use elsewhere.
But nonetheless. The biggest historical changes still have to start as individual, isolated thoughts. Just letting someone know that they have permission to think heterodox thoughts, privately, to themselves, can be very powerful. If it wasn’t, then TPTB wouldn’t be so obsessed with censorship and deplatforming. Tiny messages communicated from one individual to another can go on to have ripple effects. Or so we have to hope, anyway.
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This is why we can't have nice things.
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