Brighton NHS trust recommends drug-induced male breastfeeding in their maternity protocols

[zibzibara]

https://www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/MP005-Perinatal-Care-for-Trans-and-Non-Binary-People.pdf

This is part of their maternity protocols for perinatal care. In the Infant feeding section:

"5.5.7 Non-gestational parents may wish to participate in feeding their
infants using their own bodies. Cis women who have previously breastfed may have the most success in relactating. Trans women and cis women who have not been pregnant may also be able to induce lactation to some extent. Methods for inducing lactation include using galactagoues and physical stimulation. Alternatively, some families choose to use supplemental nursing systems with expressed milk or formula."

They cite this website in the reference list: http://www.milkjunkies.net/2013/05/trans-women-and-breastfeeding-personal.html

Notably they do not cite any source which has tested the composition of any such male secretions for safety and nutritional value.

There was an article using male bats feeding their young as justification, as it happens. 🥹

I couldn’t find a link for that though.

Amazing that it is being referred to as breastfeeding now they have found a way for men to do it but it was to be referred to as chest feeding when it was women as was triggering. How this is allowed is disgusting. No care for the health of the baby.

This was February 2018. I have not seen anything to prove that any in-depth studies have been released since to counter this expert's opinion. And there has been plenty of other threads since this that where these studies would have been posted by activist posters.

I’m surprised nobody has undertaken a nutritional analysis of male breast milk. Must be quite a straightforward thing to do in this day and age. Or perhaps they have and the results have been buried because they were not validating enough and might have got in the way of a man’s entitlement to “feed” their child.

I worked for that trust for a short while, they are absolutely bat shit crazy.

I was a midwife decades ago and honestly, anything like this being proposed back then would have been greeted with complete horror and disbelief.
Later in my career I spent a couple of years in a European project looking at drug safety in obstetrics.
I absolutely agree with pp that either the research has not been done into the content of these drug induced male secretions, OR, it has, and the results have been buried.
Either way it seems completely unethical to me.
It makes me feel ill.

FFS, whereas women struggling to produce sufficient breast milk are denied domperidone! I was one, even when readmitted at 6 weeks with failure to thrive 😡

The arguments for this in the past have also included a tribe in Africa where male adults used to comfort their infants on their nipples, a unverified story of a man feeding his infant when the mother died in childbirth, bats and the denial that there is anything fetishistic motivating this push.

Not ONE poster has ever answered the question of what is benefit to the infant.

Every poster in the past defended the male ‘right’ to do this but could not list one benefit to the child after seeing the articles and what research there was and admitting the composition of this secretion is still unknown.

Instead the posts about how transphobic we are get plonked down. Plus posts about women taking artificial hormones and prescribed drugs as false equivalences come through.

That is where we are in this. Some people would prefer to support adult’s decisions over the needs of the most vulnerable- infants.

One of the key unethical things here is the unknowns involved.

Okay, you may feel the you want to encourage men who want to put their fluids into babies, but this is entering a field of unknowns. We should to some extent try to balance the man's needs with the babies.

It would make more sense to offer guidance on adding semen to the diet, because that at least can be done naturally without relying on a cocktail of drugs, plus we understand the composition of seminal fluid better, so would have a better idea of what supplements would be required, and what proportion of the diet being male excretions was tolerable.

FUCK THE FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLES.

That's all I have this morning. Sorry.

Obviously not directed at anyone on this thread. Even if the semen proposition is not helping with the rage.

Thank goodness I haven't taken my meds yet today. They would be coming straight up again.

"...and then one day, for no reason at all, Hitler was elected to power."

It's become like the headless hysteria and running around that was so lampooned in the middle classes in Edwardian times if anyone said the words 'women and children first!' Now mention the 'T' word and all common sense flees on the spot and you see middle classes and institutions start hurling deckchairs in all directions.

Yes, this cannot be in the best interests of the child, who should not be subordinated to the wishes and feelings of the male involved.

Yes, this is absolutely incoherent and incompatible with the standards required of mothers breastfeeding where the child's needs are often met at severe detriment to the mother - the differing standards are stark.

And yes, this is for some men, a sexual thing, and questions have to be asked about how this can be done without some of those males wishing to do it, in fact wishing to use a baby to enable a man's sexual experience. Which is, to anyone with a retained grip on basic reality, unacceptable.

But we apparently now all live in la la land.

I am happy to hurl a deckchair at this point nils. Preferably one on the deck of the titanic.

Er…. It’s the guidelines they’ve always had for women who adopt or use a surrogate mother. I’ve never seen people being so up in arms about it.

They’ve just added transwomen to the lot. I have health concerns around that (due to the high level of hormones etc….) but seriously, how many transwomen do you think are going to bf like this ever? As described, it’s hard enough for a woman who has lactated before. But a transwoman?

And yet in Australia up until mid last year, one endocrinologist had helped 5 males do this.

How many infants being fed secretions from male breasts are allowed before we can be “up in arms about it”?

This is why I left La Leche League. They were clear that this should be an option and we should support parents if they wished to induce lactation, and I couldn’t see how it would benefit the baby at all to be fed by someone biologically male.

I also felt uncomfortable with supporting women to induce lactation as it’s so complex medically and in terms of the huge time commitment, and there’s a real risk of it being continued when it’s not working well for the baby as the mum feels so strongly about it. Leader training just doesn’t have enough about it for me to feel I could manage that risk properly, but I was happy to accept that more experienced Leaders with other qualifications (nursing, IBCLC etc) could.

Given the lack of evidence and research, I can’t see how any Leader, even a qualified midwife, could be sure that supporting a biological male to breastfeed would not harm the baby. Let alone be beneficial for it.

The evidence is already there, yes some male people will wish to do this.

Their reasons will be varied.

Some will be justifiable and some will be deeply concerning.

As with all of this, how would you like to place a boundary so that newborn babies are protected from being used to provide a sexual act for an adult male, (who will like all abusers sound very rational and justified, think of the chap in court this week who explained that he abducted and sexually assaulted a child to 'keep her warm' in his bed and through being 'motherly'. And that newborns are protected from drugs that would never be permitted into their systems ordinarily, because their interests must be subordinated to those of some particularly special adults.

Like all parts of identity politics, those boundaries are impossible, and it will be exploited to the harm of others. Since those others are babies, a nice relaxed 'well it'll probably be fine, lets see what happens' (an approach used in prisons for example which has led to multiple sexual assaults and rapes of vulnerable women, all easily predictable) is at this point deeply, deeply irresponsible.

You'd be surprised at the number of males who find the idea of castration arousing. No matter how outlandish a fetish may seem, there will apparently always be takers.

In fact for some the outlandishness is part of the attraction.

My Autistic Ds was born with tongue tie. Not dx by NHS. We struggled with b/f. I was given no help or advice at ALL. He ended up severely jaundiced. I bought a pump, did all I could, but when he became 'failure to thrive' issue I put him onto formula, was then given omeprazole etc as he couldn't tolerate it (GERD, query surgery for pylohric stenosis). Eventually he was on goats milk, then weaned early. Awful time. And NO HELP. Yet, NHS funds for This?
It is utterly wrong headed.

JFC.

The poor baby is simply a prop to validate the selfish adult’s “identity”. Whatever happened to “First do no harm”?

Just a chair?

I am just about to order a fucking flamethrower from Amazon, 50% off the second if you want me to pop one on my order.

There really are no words for how fucked the NHS is.

So if a plain old cis guy decided he wanted to stick his nipple in his baby's mouth to "experience" breast feeding, that would be okay?
If not, why not?

All that is different here, is that someone has said they FEEL like a woman, and this somehow magically transforms the male nipple into something else that IS acceptable?

How does a feeling in someone's head make one situation completely abhorrent, and the other situation absolutely acceptable, and not only that, but ENCOURAGED by the health trust?

When does that transformation occur? Is it the moment someone says they are trans, or does it happen before that?

In what way is this beneficial to the infant? It is well known and documented that supplemental feeding is ALWAYS needed when lactation is induced through drug regimens, so if the infant is going to be fed supplementally anyway, what is the point of this?

The point is, of course, that it is for the benefit of the person DOING the feeding, and not for the benefit of the infant.

The reasons WHY the person would choose to do this............

well, I cannot possibly speculate.

That went out the window with GIDS at the Tavistock years ago.

I hope someone somewhere is keeping track of the health outcomes for infants being used this way as props for an ideology; male milk, conception in a body flooded with synthetic testosterone and only gradually waning over the course of pregancy. Meanwhile, warnings persist for soft cheese, shellfish, alcohol etc.