"Human Milk" ffs

And the benefits to long-term maternal health are really important too. It's known that breastfeeding helps women lose surplus weight gained in pregnancy, and reduces the risk of cervical, uterine and ovarian cancers amongst other things.

I also feel weepy having read all of this thread, plus the links elsewhere. It is over 30 years since I breastfed our two boys, but I remember it well. DH and I were just talking about the role of fathers in breastfeeding: caring for the mother and child, other children, taking on household tasks etc. These are all things that he did, plus giving me encouragement and support.

This is the role of the father, NOT breastfeeding!

Because there's no part of them that actually wants to be a woman. It's stops short of all of that. You don't see them campaigning for women's issues, or taking on the mental load, or understanding women or having any affinity with them at all.

Quite the opposite.

The woman and the womanhood that they want is an invention that has no basis in reality.

That have not the slightest interest in, or understanding of, what breastfeeding and childbirth actually entails for a woman.

It is shocking.

The side effects of these drugs are acceptable for the use they are approved and designed for, mainly men with end stage prostate cancer who don't have very long to live.

These should be nowhere near healthy children.

It gets more and more shocking the more information is revealed. @OneMorePlant

This is worse than experimenting without knowing what the risks are - it is pushing an agenda knowing that it is seriously risking the health of children.

Yes they know. It's on the little piece of paper that comes with the drugs under pregnancy warnings in every box.

It's the same with lupron that is used as "puberty blockers" that is claimed to be safe and reversible.

If you look at the warnings on the labels possible side effects can be brain swelling in children, heart attack symptoms, stroke like symptoms, seizures, muscle weakness, loss of bowel or bladder control, psychotic episodes, back pain, ....

And that is what they know without any existing studies on long term effects of brain development etc because those practically do not exist. There is a recent one with only a few subjects that shows IQ dropped 10-15 points. For reference an average IQ is about 100. If you have 135 you are in the 1% of really smart people, if you have 75 you are Forrest Gump. So 10-15 points is huge.

https://www.drugs.com/lupron.html

A male pursuing the aim to make an infant suck a secretion from their nipples is actively taking from the breastfeeding relationship in ways which could significantly affect the success of feeding. Women are not machines, successful breastfeeding is a two way relationship

This is a very good point.

The more a lactating mother* feeds her baby, they more readily her milk flows, and the more milk is produced. If breastfeeding is interrupted (eg the mother is very ill/ needs hospital treatment which stops her feeding her baby for even a few days) it can have an impact on the production of milk - sometimes breastfeeding can't be resumed at all.

Additionally it has been shown that nature not only changes the composition of breastmilk as the child grows and develops, but also adapts it to the sex of the infant. Milk of breastfeeding mothers of male babies has a different nutritional composition to milk from mothers breastfeeding feeding female babies. (I'm not sure how this works out with the mothers of male/female twins, but certainly with singletons this has been observed in a number of studies.)

*I use the term "mother" for ease, and as meaning the natural mother of a baby. I am aware that some adoptive mothers are able to breast-feed babies, and also that there may still be women who are wet nurses in this day and age, I don't know, but I'm not trying to exclude them.

You are not alone.

Agree. For me I'd say it sort of destroyed my identity. I struggle to take the notion of identity seriously since experiencing motherhood and how little society and biology gives a shit about how you feel about yourself.

And they definitely weren’t the thing that encouraged me to keep going when I was finding breast feeding isolating and difficult.

Leaving aside benefits, I find it odd to connect the process to identity, because I found that so much of the practical process of pregnancy and child birth was completely irrelevant to my identity.

Pregnancy happens regardless of whether you even want children, and from that moment onwards I think most of it is out of your control.

(trigger warning)
Crown Prosecution's Website. Sexual Offences Act 2003 – offences against children. From Chapter 7, Section 8: Causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity.

'A child under 13 does not, under any circumstances, have the legal capacity to consent to any form of sexual activity.'

'These are offences of strict liability as to age. The prosecution has to prove only two facts.
First, the intentional sexual activity and
Second, the age of the complainant at the date of the sexual activity, using, for example, a certified copy of a birth certificate together with evidence of identity.'

absolutely. I don't know any mother for who breastfeeding wasn't about trying to make the right decision for their child. I know plenty who struggled and felt intense guilt from organisations who made them feel inadequate.

precisely zero of those benefits are about reinforcing your "euphoria" about being a woman, though

I agree some of them may be fake but I don't think the MPs are. Eg Clive Lewis MP has publicly defended the stance on this.

It’s in plain sight - normalising males putting part of their bodies in children’s mouths to suck on for the adult male’s pleasure and validation.

I have formula fed a baby and breastfed a baby. I agree that I do get joy from breastfeeding and although it is primarily for baby it is also for me and I'll miss it when we stop. Having said that, my motivation for starting breastfeeding was purely for baby. My first was formula fed (attempted but failed breastfeeding) and I wasn't ever sad for me missing out on it, I felt bad because I felt like I wasn't giving her the best but also really loved the convenience of others being able to feed her.
Just wanted to put a spin on the doing it for you, maybe it is partly for you but perhaps not when initially deciding to attempt it? Do we really think these men are approaching this the same way?

Thanks for that link @Mumoftwo1312. I've just scrolled through all the names, and the political parties, organisations and professions represented.

Admittedly a few are - I am going to assume - fake but dear Lord, the human race is fucked. At this rate, I'm going to end my days living up a mountain. I don't even like mountains.

Just wanted to add - although there are these benefits to the mum, I still have never met a FF mum who regretted not having those benefits. For them, the regrets/grief/needless guilt they had were exclusively about the benefits to the baby.

I've never ever met a mum who said "I can't breastfeed and I'm sad about that because of the protective factor against breast cancer". It was always more like "I'm worried my baby isn't getting the breastmilk antibodies"

I'm not willing to hide that for me, there were benefits to breastfeeding beyond the most important benefit (feeding my children).

Oh absolutely - it helps safeguard against ppd, delays menstruation, helps with pp weight loss, protective factor against breast cancer and some other female-reproductive-system cancers.

Lots of benefits to bf for the mum, I'm a huge fan of bf. None of those benefits are relevant to men at all.

I've heard so many women being made to feel terrible by medical professionals for feeding their children formula, yet now the same medical profession claims this artificial milk produced by men is just as good. How??

Can’t help thinking that if male animals can produce milk as viably and safely as females, the dairy industry would be using this technology instead of slaughtering so many male calves.

Excellent point

I'm not willing to hide that for me, there were benefits to breastfeeding beyond the most important benefit (feeding my children). Abusive males and thick abuse enablers aren't going to change my reality.

But let's pretend for a second that the content of male nipple secretion is harmless (it isn't). A male pursuing the aim to make an infant suck a secretion from their nipples is actively taking from the breastfeeding relationship in ways which could significantly affect the success of feeding. Women are not machines, successful breastfeeding is a two way relationship which needs a supportive environment to flourish. It can be very difficult for some mothers, especially when support is hard to find.

A male who is focussing on something so purely about themselves and their own identity is at huge risk of not providing enough of the support the mother actually needs and not providing enough of the mundane routine endless care that newborns actually need and that forms the basis of the parent - child relationship.

Yes - I can’t remember ever thinking about it as something that was for the mother, and if there were posts on MN that talked about it in that way, I can’t remember them. There are definitely posts about fathers/MILs feeling excluded by exclusive breast feeding, but there the push is towards mixed feeding, and the discussion is about the impact on the baby, not the mother.

(trigger warning - suggestion of cruelty to animals following)

Can’t help thinking that if male animals can produce milk as viably and safely as females, the dairy industry would be using this technology instead of slaughtering so many male calves.

I have a couple of mum-friends who couldn't breastfeed and had to switch to FF when their babies were still little.

Their grief about it was entirely in terms of fear that their LOs weren't getting the nutrition they needed. They feared that formula isn't quite as beneficial etc.

Not one of them grieved for the "euphoria" or the "experience". They were all just frantic that their baby wasn't getting the best start in life.

(Nb their babies are now older kids and are totally fine, this is not a formula bashing post.)

I'm just contrasting the motivations of mothers in trying to breastfeed. By mothers ofc I mean the actual female ones.

The only thing the man has is a feeling of "being left out" he has no need, no entitlement, no biological primal urge to do this.

This. The do gooders, rather than the deliberate enablers, are just not moving past the magical thinking that these men are "women" in every sense. It's nonsense.