Lactation support conference in Ireland - the quiet part out loud

The explanation for those techniques is very straight forward: when you leave a breast engorged or simply un-fed-from, it produces a hormone that tells your body to decrease supply (the hormone has been identified but i can't remember its name and tbh I don't care what it's called). When you draw milk from a breast (even partially emptying it not fully) a different hormone tells your body to increase supply - NB this is much more effective done by a baby than a machine.

So when you stick to one breast for a long session, the other gets left untouched, and the "reduce supply" hormone gets triggered.

Absolutely. He needs to be held to account by every woman in that room. This isn't 2020/21 anymore, the height of woke fever, cancel culture all powerful. It's time perverts like this were sent packing with their tails between their legs.

OK so I know I've derailed loads here but here's why it's relevant - we have got here because of (pseudo)-scientific hubris.

Breastfeeding has been optimised through 100,000s of years of human practice. Scientific studies into breastfeeding should be observational, documenting and recording how it works, not trying to improve on it.

It is the height of hubris to do one or two flimsy lab studies then boldly say to mothers "you should breastfeed like this [block feeding for weight gain], not how mothers usually successfully do it". Instead, we should observe how experienced breastfeeding mothers enable their babies to gain weight and document it and publish it.

It's the same hubris that analysed the macronutrients of breastmilk then boldly told mothers that formula is better "because it is developed by scientists".

It is the same hubris that tries to replicate breastfeeding in a man. A man! This is how we got here: we thought we could not just mimic nature bio-identically but even improve on it.

I don't blame the scientists who actually measured the fat content. I blame the ignorant "lactation consultants" who made sweeping erroneous recommendations based on it.

Not all of them of course - eg I highly recommend reading Lucy Webber who is a lactation consultant and who also highlights this hindmilk myth on facebook.

I am slightly bewildered here.

How many grandmothers of fifty (who are not at the time of their grandchild's birth lactating) want to breastfeed the baby? Has this become a norm since I was having my children/grandchildren? And if they did, would scientists want to facilitate it, or would they suggest gently that it really wasn't necessary in these days of readily-available formula, even if the mother for some reason was unable to feed her own baby?

I really cannot see encouraging a man of fifty to abuse a newborn for his own gratification as anything but perverted.

This thread is worth remembering. Every time one of the usual suspects (or new to mumsnet bad faith posters) lectures woman for exercising critical thinking and due diligence about trans extremism, remember this thread and these men.

The men who use the cloak of #nodebate and myth of the sacred caste who may never be challenged, to promote the undermining of safeguarding children. Of course they're a minority. But they move unchallenged by all the useful idiots in society.

Until they're stopped, they'll make more and more extreme demands like this.

I believe this specimen's opinions are all part of the de-pathologisation/de-stigmatisation drive of transvestisism. Reading Róisín Michaux keep the receipts on what the EU, WHO, UN are doing re normalizing this area, publically most visible in the push to self ID, and the long march to dilute a paraphylia diagnosis on transvestic disorder, via dysmorphia to "simple" sexual health category, also seem in parallel with HIV/AIDS, where the previous medical advice to hugely warn against behaviour guaranteed to spread the disease has been shelved for no advice, carry on as much as you like.
Once any public shame is removed, dissent crowded out, even value judgements avoided, them you have the fertile territory of "normalizing" chest feeding by men, and no criticism meaning no protection for the baby.
We're at a point where this "expert" will promote this behavior, yet complain on public health grounds if the chest feeding "mother" is a smoker, or has a terrible diet.
I would say lol, but there's nothing to laugh about here.
Q is, are the women at this conference going to humiliate this man? Because if he walks away without hearing a wall of noise, he'll reasonably conclude he's won this part of the culture war.

He may not even realise that he is in a culture war at all; people who are blinkered in pursuit of their specialities may be very blind to what seems obvious to others. In which case he needs to have it drawn to his attention, possibly using a two-bi-two.

As I said, the liberals have become afraid of passing judgement on the libertines. Right-wingers pass judgement on others, and demand to control them, not liberals!

That’s why women who embody the concept of ‘live and let live’ by completely accepting those who reject having stereotypes imposed upon them, are labelled right-wing when we point out that certain things have gone beyond liberal into libertine, and into anarchistic power games. When we point out that live and let live applies to the vulnerable in society as well as to the powerful, and that to enable the vulnerable to live the powerful must accept that they cannot have everything they want to the cost of those less powerful than them.

Safeguarding is seen as something ‘true’ liberals should not do, as it imposes control upon others. Bit of a luxury belief, really. Easy enough to be so liberal, so open minded, when you do not feel at any risk from the consequences, when the only risk to you is that of being penalised for not being liberal enough and open-minded enough.

This is why I love this site, for pithy takes like this. Do you follow Róisín Michaux? She's highlighting so many areas of cultural and institutional capture.
Basically liberalism is being stress tested, and is being found wanting.
For this man to actually admit on record that sexual gratification is on the list of reasons to embrace this practice, can anyone please tell me how this isn't promoting or approving of pedophilia?
As I say, to be so brazen, so confident he can say this and ride the tiger, says as much about Western society as it does about him.
Even Caligula would have thought twice about saying what he said in front of a roomful of Roman women. He'd wouldn't have made it out of there

The baby won’t be taking medication in both cases though.
If an adoptive mother stimulated lactation with hormones she would probably use a breast pump initially to stimulate milk production and she would stop taking any drugs once that milk supply is established.
She could choose not to feed the baby directly or feed any expressed milk containing artificial hormones until she is naturally producing milk.
The milk she produced would also be equivalent to milk produced by any other woman who had stimulated milk production by giving birth.
Very different to men taking drugs to produce nipple secretions, that would stop a soon as they stop taking the drugs, because they are men and their bodies are not designed to feed infants.

That's very helpful, tx.

Or she could choose to stimulate lactation without using drugs at all. https://shop.medela.co.uk/products/spare-parts/medela-supplemental-nursing-system-sns/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12949033401&gbraid=0AAAAADf-Ogl-BE5VCIUnUQtJ9kJv1ffX9&gclid=Cj0KCQjwnbrUBhDOARIsAKKhPpemVTfS6WnWl74CU7wweM25knuBCcEw0KvQhLO2DjSUG-A0WRjM3joaAgimEALw_wcB

I have, just once, but she wasn't fifty; she was going to bring up her grand-daughter as her daughter because the mother, her actual daughter, was underage and didn't know who the baby's father was, and the grandmother wanted to spare her daughter shame. This was in the sixties. How she persuaded her milk to come in for the baby I have no idea: I didn't like to ask. For some reason the whole family was a little sensitive about it all.

Me, too. I have an elderly relative who was a child in another country during WW2. Her neighbourhood lived in abject poverty for 10-12 years. Mothers who could breastfeed fed the babies of those who could not, irrespective of generation. It was about survival, not validation. I very much doubt anybody had calories spare to trigger lactation, but once a woman had given birth and started lactating she could continue indefinitely - as long as she was breastfeeding.

It was also not something that was spoken about. I only learned about it about 20y ago when this relative’s father died. From his eulogy I learned that he had been the main co-ordinator of finding breastmilk for newborns, starting with his own. It was a surprise that a man had done this, but my relative was an extremely taciturn man, well-known for his discretion and charitable deeds.

Yes, they can, as in my relative’s experience. But whether they can initiate it without the hormonal cascade of giving birth is another question. Would they even try, under such circumstances? I doubt it. Those who could feed fed the babies whose mothers could not and in return the those mothers could focus their energies on food/shelter/warmth for the group.

My mother was absolutely furious with Nestlé about the formula milk in the third world scandal, but her take on it was slightly different from most people's: she railed against them for stupidity as well. In her view, they could have sold a lot more powdered milk for nursing mothers than they sold formula for babies, and the mothers probably wouldn't have died if they were unable to boil the water to make up their drink, since they were already drinking the possibly-dodgy water in order to survive themselves. So not only were Nestlé responsible for a lot of unnecessary death and suffering, they also didn't make a profit that they could have done and thus did themselves down as well.

Thank you, this makes so much sense!

From the OP:
“Inducing Lactation for Kinksters”
You WHAT now?

@Kingdomofsleep thank v much for that info.

I don't think it's derailing, at all. Every time these awful men pretend they can breast feed, it's very useful being reminded of the complex and miraculous process that is actual breastfeeding.

It really is an extraordinary relationship completely impossible to be replicated by men.