Sign up for a free recipe e-book →

Clarissa's Blog

Breast Is Best and Female

Published by

Clarissa

on

A breastfeeding group on FB banned references to women and mothers. We can all guess the country where it happened:

You can’t even call yourself a woman when you breastfeed. What a victory for feminism.

Please note the standard rhetorical trick where noticing objective reality is equated with murderous intent (“debating the validity of people’s existence”). Being called a woman doesn’t threaten anybody’s existence but this is a neat shortcut to make the use of the word “mom” an equivalent of genocide.

P.S. The group in question also banned the phrases “breast is best” and “fed is best” because they are also somehow exclusionary.

6 responses to “Breast Is Best and Female”

  1. random reader Avatar
    random reader

    I was kind of understanding this post until the banning “fed is best” part – do they mean that letting babies starve of hunger is equivalent to feeding them? Nevermind about being confused about whether mothers are women, they are confused about the basics of a taking care of babies. Also, the irony of this group not being inclusive of mothers and ladies is rich.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Fed is best means that formula is fine if you aren’t managing to breastfeed. But it does sound atrocious when people ban the expression.

      Like

      Reply
      1. Pen Avatar
        Pen

        Yeah, that sounds like the group has had arguments break out between people who breastfeed exclusively and those who either do not or cannot. Though “fed is best” is the least exclusionary statement possible when it comes to that, so I really don’t know what they’re getting at there other than attempting to ban the entire argument.

        Like

        Reply
        1. random reader Avatar
          random reader

          There have been cases in the US where children ended up with long-term damage from not being fed enough as newborns because of the stupid arguments like that, so I am not sympathetic. It is unclear to me why the lactation support organizations have been overtaken by the most leftist of lefties since they do not have too many kids… Even the founder of La Leche League resigned from the board of directors of this organization in 2024 in protest over the craziness, saying that the organization has become “a travesty of my original intent”.

          Like

          Reply
  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    I wasn’t going to chime in on this one, but a question just came to mind, and its one I think is worth bringing up.

    Why now. Why now out of 6,000 years of humans on earth is it that women don’t seem to have enough milk to feed their own children. You can’t sit there and tell me with a straight face that 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago. Women were unable to feed their kids.

    If that was the case we would have either died out or had massive issues with height, muscles, etc.

    And yes I am accounting for areas and times where there were famines and plagues. No I mean why now in the last few decades does there seem to be this huge problem of not enough milk being produced to feed babies. To the point where formula which was supposed to be a supplement to help out, is now being used as the main source of food for the babies.

    So my question is, what went wrong? Was it the psych meds, the food, the endless drugs by the docs, the morning after pills, the pill whatever the actual name is. What is causing this lack of food for kids from their mothers?

    • – W

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s all that you list, and also people used to live communally and a woman could breastfeed her baby and her sister’s, for example.

      I started supplementing early but I had no support and physical recovery was really hard for me for the first 4 months. Obviously, I’m an outlier, so my example is not good for most moms.

      I’d say that I only recovered physically completely after a full year. But that was after two grueling, high-high-risk pregnancies at an advanced age. I’m not recommending my journey to anybody.

      It’s unpredictable, too, because my mother couldn’t breastfeed me after giving birth at 22 while she happily breastfed my sister exclusively for over a year six years later. I almost died in infancy because she had no breast milk and there was no formula in the Ukrainian countryside in 1976.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

Leave a comment

A conservative literary critic and college professor

Recent posts