Lactation support conference in Ireland - the quiet part out loud

I remember when he was trying to remove his artistic nude photos from the internet as they showed his meat and veg. It rather shatters the illusion of the skull shaving, bolt-on tits and filters when you are clearly looking at a dude with boobs.

When my first baby was born I attended a baby massage course at my local maternity hospital - very little massage actually got done ☺️. One woman would start feeding her baby and one by one most of the group would join them. It was really lovely and so supportive to be in that environment. Similarly meeting up with NCT groups etc. I imagine the olden days being a bit like that - much more of a community of women looking after their babies and children together. No men required.

Breast man | TERF Times

from 3 Sept-

Louise Guinness reports on the fallout after a ‘lactation for kinksters’ speaker was invited to address a conference for breastfeeding experts in Ireland

Jacob Engelsman is based in the US and specialises in helping non-gestational parents, meaning parents who have not given birth, to induce lactation. The Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland (ALCI) booked Engelsman to speak at its annual conference in Galway next month, and all hell broke loose.

Engelsman was reported to have given previous presentations including one entitled ‘Inducing Lactation for Kinksters’. In his book, Lactation for the Rest of Us, he writes that, aside from ‘cis men’ wanting to lactate for the same reasons as anyone else, namely to feed and bond with their baby, they may wish to do so ‘to a lesser extent for curiosity, fun or sexual gratification’. After press coverage, ALCI paused ticket sales and removed the programme from its website. It has since announced that the conference will move online and that Engelsman will no longer speak.

I found this an odd paragraph:

Engelsman is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), but for his critics, his willingness to discuss lactation for sexual gratification violates one of humanity’s most sacred taboos: the bond between a mother and her baby.
[my bold]

She does expand on this further on, but surely, what critcs are (or should be) objecting to is "one of humanity's most sacred taboos": child abuse?

I would think this was obvious??

This bit strikes me about your relative’s life:
“granny, mother of 11, swung in and held the fort with the fountain pen
until mum could take over.”

She’d had 11 children so must have spent much of her own adult life breast feeding, and yet the fountain pen was the only option. Because I’ve never been convinced that milk does come back all that easily once it has actually dried up. I expect that women who wetnursed dozens of babies went straight from one to the next, without a real break in between.

I’d never really thought much about giving women domperidone etc to bring in their milk until this, but if it does happen, I think it’s really not great for the babies concerned either.

It’s not quite the same because the woman’s general hormonal profile is “natural” for the baby - hence why oestrogen contraceptive pills aren’t a given when a woman is feeding - whereas a transidentifying man will undoubtedly be taking oestrogen and possibly testosterone suppressing medication too.
And there’d obviously be an exception if induced lactation is only to get it started and the baby isn’t given the domperidone-affected milk.

EDIT: it was meant to be THE not there/their - honest!! 😅

That's just bad English, though, surely. Should have been sub-edited. The bond between mother and baby is not a taboo.

""There are very, very few cases of non-starving women who truly cannot produce enough milk to keep a baby alive."" I do just want to highlight this isn't the case, the percentage of women who cannot physiologically produce any milk at all is relatively low ( not great stats reliability but perhaps 5 to10%) but plenty of mums aren't able to produce sufficient quantities to allow exclusive BF or who struggle in other ways. Considering many women faced the deaths of their children or their own deaths related to pregnancy and birth we perhaps shouldn't over extol the life experiences of women in time past. My own mum and her siblings were raised on milk straight from the cow, from birth onwards back in the 50's. Many young babies were also introduced to food well before 6 months in the fairly recent past - introducing foods at 2-3 mths was common in the 1970's! Hence why again it underlines the importance of giving mums adequate support for their own feeding journeys - and why a lactation conference should be centred on the needs of women and babies, not generating headlines that indicate anyone might wish to do so for sexual reasons or that biological men should be facilitated to BF .

When I was breastfeeding, solids could to be introduced at three months or 15lbs which ever came first.

his willingness to discuss lactation for sexual gratification violates one of humanity’s most sacred taboos: the bond between a mother and her baby.

It's a very odd sentence. Do they think that breastfeeding generally is arousing, and therefore we should be all talking about it.

I bet it's a very common misconception of many men, because really, what else are tits for, love?

The exact dates for that claim matter hugely though: my mother was told in the mid 60s that she didn’t have enough milk to feed me because breastfeeding was actively discouraged at the time. She went on to breastfeed her 3rd and subsequent children perfectly well (in the 70s, when the “hippy movement had changed attitudes I suppose, not that my mum was a hippy obviously!), so clearly she just needed help with her first that she didn’t get, and then didn’t have the confidence to even try with the second.

Basically I don’t think we can assume that supposed problems with breastfeeding in the last century are necessarily indicative of physiological problems. Remember that even in famines many women continued to feed their children while their own bodies were starving - obviously they probably weren’t producing enough milk for the baby to thrive, but my point is that the body makes milk production one of its priorities, certainly over the woman’s physical comfort. It was always said that each baby cost its mother a tooth - that’s about her body using up its calcium stocks to provide what the baby needs.

So I was making a more general point that isn’t about what women in a medicalised situation were told by the “experts”. I’d be really surprised if anything like 10% of healthy women in societies where BF-ing is the norm are genuinely unable to produce enough milk to feed their babies other than occasional drops in production that don’t threaten the baby’s life.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if 10-15% of women were told that though, because the medical staff found it easier to give the baby a bottle than to wait and see.

I remember him standing on a platform, telling women to shut up about their bodies, because snot fair. Flanked by women, who were happy to have him there.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Julia Long takedown of him at some event, where she challenged him about his approval of an 11 year-old drag queen. She was very brave, in a room full of men who clearly hated her, and indeed any woman.

we've definitely moved on since then. Thank heavens.

I wonder too if it’s 5-10% of ALL women, which would include those with chronic illnesses which might all make BF-ing an extra strain on the body.
I think it’s important to point out that women in the past went on getting pregnant despite past miscarriages and other illnesses, so that it’s not surprising that after baby number 6 and pregnancy number 9 (say), a woman without lots of help at home would be so exhausted that her milk supply would suffer. I have no ideas of numbers though.

Extrapolating from those women to modern women who have two or three children, well spaced out, and moreover are not doing the sort of heavy physical work that someone like my grandmother would have done, to say that significant numbers of healthy women today can’t produce enough milk doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

having had a body that generally did anything I wanted it to to a reasonable standard, finding I was rubbish at making breast milk (and giving birth, but that's a different story) was quite the unpleasant surprise, and made me feel very inferior for a while. I'm completely sure I made a lot more milk the second time around, but it still felt a bit touch and go.

I was much more prepared second time around for the physical side of breastfeeding. I just found endlessly sitting on the sofa while DS1 dozed and fed unbelievably depressing with my first but rather relished it the second time (probably because I knew it was for such a relatively short time).

I also actually drank somewhere near enough water second time.

I knew what breast feeding actually looked like, so I could tell when DS2 was actively feeding or just having a comforting snooze.

and I had the confidence to ignore advice and co-sleep and let DS2 night feed which was when my body was actually making the most milk I think.

I probably could have exclusively breast fed DS1, but he would have been one of those skinny, grizzly, non sleeping babies and frankly I was not up for that, so formula it was.

even with DS2, the minute I introduced solid food he was like 'actual food in quantities that fill me up. I am hereby done with breast milk'.

Bearing in mind how much I hated breast feeding DS1 (because it went so badly and made me feel such a failure), it's strange to find that I look back with some fondness on breast feeding DS2.

It's such a complex thing isn't it? hard to see how a man could understand and give advice on it.

It may well have been on MN that I learned fairly recently that in humans, unlike most mammals, the feeding instinct is not nearly so well developed among both mothers and babies, and has to be actually learned.

As I said earlier, the huge luck I had was in the first couple of days being in a hospital ward beside a woman who knew what she was doing, and in a couple of minutes just because she was in the bed next to me whenever I fed, she showed me the most important things - like she told me to take him off the breast far sooner than the nurses had, which I now know both increases milk supply but also (which is what she told me) stops the nipples from getting painful or cracked.

Sadly I think a lot of that knowledge has been lost in the west, so first time mothers often just don’t have the support circle needed to succeed right from the start. That’s why it took you two goes to really get it!

I was one of the 5% who couldn't exclusively breastfeed unfortunately. I was so determined to do it and it was really important to me but it was physically impossible. I just couldn't produce enough milk. Perfectly healthy in every other way. I got 3 different lactation consultants, one each time I had a baby. On the first two I had to resort to bottle feeding as they lost too much weight. On the third I bottle fed and gave my baby 'dessert breastmilk' for 11 months as I wanted to give him what I could.

I think it's a dangerous narrative not to acknowledge that some women have genuine problems breastfeeding despite their best intentions. I kept thinking I just needed to stick with it and not give a bottle but I probably endangered my baby's life and if there was more open dialogue about some women genuinely unable to breastfeed I wouldn't have thought to try persevere as much. Luckily I got the lactation consultant very early and got his weight up with the bottle.

I remember feeling like a total failure and thinking if I'd lived a hundred years ago my baby would have died and the lactation consultant matter of factly said yes, that's true. In reality I suppose a wet nurse would have been used, or cows milk or something.

The difference of course is that as a mother you want to do everything you can that's in the best interests of your baby. You will literally sacrifice your own health if it means keeping your baby alive. The fact that Cuidiu, ALCI and the HSE is entertaining this pervert in any way and allowing him a platform to speak on behalf of 'chest feeding men' is abhorrent and beyond distressing.

Oh and my first was a big, fat but still non-sleeping baby - if I’d obeyed the “rules” on not co-sleeping when feeding, I’d have had a mental breakdown! I fed him at night until he was one, but only because I could bring him into the bed stick him on the boob and then waken up some hours later with him still sound asleep in the crook of my arm. As I knew that my GM had never owned a cot, and was horrified at my mother’s “modern” ideas of putting babies in cots, I had no problem with doing that. None of her 10 children died of cosleeping.

Again I know it happens, and I’m not dismissing it at all (I had a neighbour who lost two babies to SIDS) but I think it’s either children who are already vulnerable, like my neighbour’s babies, or women taking sleeping tablets or other.

Concerning my neighbour, the second baby died during a midday nap, so co-sleeoing can’t have been the cause, but he did always seem to have a runny nose and a cold, even at a few months old. He was the same age as my daughter so I saw him a lot before he died. The first baby had died before I knew her but she had told me about him. She followed all the rules about back sleeping and no cosleeping etc for the second one.

No you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying women should just carry on and it will sort itself out. I’m saying that we (society, health professionals etc) more or less accidentally broke the link of women teaching each other how to breastfeed during the 20th century, and that you can no more expect all women to be able to breastfeed straight out of the block than you can expect children to know how to ride a bike without any help. Some do, but most need to be taught, and there’s no shame in that.
But if you have nobody to teach you, how can you learn? You could keep going, with a skinny, distressed baby - but l don’t think BF-ing is worth that.

So I’m not criticising women for not succeeding. It’s inevitable in our fragmented society. I’m just lamenting the loss of that expertise that was previously passed on over countless generations.

ETA “the baby would have died … the lactation consultant matter of factly said yes, that's true”

See I’m not convinced by this. It’s like the “fertility collapses after 35” axiom, which comes from French data from the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s not comparable to modern 35 year olds because women of 35 at that time had generally been having sex for a decade, possibly two - so if they had never been pregnant by 35, the problem was not the age, but the pre existing infertility. And if they stopped having babies at 35 after already having had several before that, again, that may be explained by lots of reasons other than primary infertility.
https://www.med.unc.edu/timetoconceive/how-long-can-you-wait-to-have-a-baby/

Whereas women nowadays may only be starting to try to get pregnant at 35, which is not the same thing at all.
Same with “babies died in the past” well yes they did but did they really die from lack of milk or from a cold that became bronchitis or whatever? Some women couldn’t produce milk - but had they themselves been properly nourished as children and had the healthcare that women nowadays have grown up with? How many other children were those women looking after at the same time? Maybe it was just physical exhaustion that led them to have a lower milk supply. Our reproductive lives are not directly comparable to theirs, and that affects milk supply.

But I'm still reading your post as not understanding that sometimes there is a physical reason why women can't breastfeed. It's not always down to lack of knowledge. Sometimes it is.

I think it interesting that a woman may be able to breastfeed one or more babies perfectly ok but fail to produce enough milk for another one. It's particularly interesting if the one she can't breast-feed because the supply simply isn't there is a middle child rather than a first or a last one. What is the cause? How can that be addressed? To hell with men wanting to torment babies, there's a whole lot of important stuff that lactation consultants could be looking at to help actual women who are actually breast-feeding babies, or want to and are having trouble doing it.

And let's not even start on idiot "experts" who fail to notice for over a week that a baby has a tongue-tie and can't suck properly!

No, I know that sometimes this happens, but I’m saying that making it into an issue of personal success or failure is a huge mistake. A lot of women are put under pressure to breastfeed and led to believe that they have failed morally as mothers if they don’t succeed. In reality it’s quite a tricky thing to do when you don’t have the social support network of women who have already breastfed, and so “failure” is far more likely. That’s not to say it’s impossible, just that a new mother needs to be taught, when women are told it’s instinctive. It’s not really.

But all of that is a failure of society, not of the woman. And then people explaining it away by unevidenced claims that a high percentage of healthy women are physically unable to breastfeed may make the individual woman feel slightly less of a failure, but at the longer term cost of making the next generation of new mothers feel that it’s all too hit-and-miss and “maybe I’m just one of those who can’t and let’s just go straight to bottle feeding”. Which is such a pity, because once BF-ing is well installed it’s just so easy (and cheap) compared to bottle feeding.

Making it into a moral failing is the first mistake IMO. Trying to get out of that moral failing by saying that lots of healthy women genuinely can’t produce enough milk is understandable but is still the wrong solution.

Anyway. I know that won’t convince lots of women who still secretly fear that not breastfeeding is a moral failing and so want desperately to prove that it’s a physical impossibility. I think it’s just very hard to do first time round without someone to teach you.

I’ve never seen any actual evidence that modern, well fed, healthy women with just one or two children cannot physically breast feed. If you have any, I’d be interested to see it.

Well, I am evidence that there is at least 1! :-) it's a bit insulting to be told that because there is insufficient scientific evidence that it can't be true. I certainly didn't imagine what I went through.

'And then people explaining it away by unevidenced claims that a high percentage of healthy women are physically unable to breastfeed may make the individual woman feel slightly less of a failure, but at the longer term cost of making the next generation of new mothers feel that it’s all too hit-and-miss and “maybe I’m just one of those who can’t and let’s just go straight to bottle feeding”. Which is such a pity, because once BF-ing is well installed it’s just so easy (and cheap) compared to bottle feeding.'

I get the dangers that some people might erroneously be put off breastfeeding when they can actually do it. My point is that it is also not in the mother or child's interest to not acknowledge that sometimes it just isn't physically possible. It's not a high percentage. It's estimated to be between 1% -5 %.

I don't want to derail the thread with this issue. I wanted to point out that sometimes it won't physically work no matter what you do so that people who are reading who may struggled don't internalise is as something they are necessarily doing wrong.

I find your post a bit insensitive to be honest.

'I’ve never seen any actual evidence that modern, well fed, healthy women with just one or two children cannot physically breast feed. If you have any, I’d be interested to see it.'

I've just told you it happened to me.

It's estimated at 1-5 percent. Like most women's issues it probably hasn't been studied or addressed enough. I don't blame you being sceptical about it. Even the first two lactation consultants were unaware of the specific issue I had ( which I would rather not post scientific research on as I already feel I've shared too much personal info). I just want to flag that it does happen. This is the kind of thing that the ALCI should actually be addressing, and should be helping women where they can.

What does the article in the Irish version of The Times say?