This is World Breastfeeding Week. Every year, from August 1st to 7th, more than 170 countries recognize this week as a way to promote and encourage breastfeeding. For almost all of human history, all children thrived on breast milk. In centuries past, elites often hired wet nurses, so the infants still got breast milk. Even the commoners would arrange for a wet nurse if the mother died or was unable to breastfeed for some other reason.
In the late 1800s, a German chemist invented a formula that could supplement or even replace breastfeeding. The ingredients consisted of cow’s milk, wheat flour, malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate. It was an almost instant success and its use quickly grew and expanded across the ocean to the United States. A variety of different formulas were developed. Some hospitals even sent mothers home with a recipe so they could make their own formula. By 1950 it was more common for women to use formula that they bought or made instead of breastfeeding their children, with only 49 percent of women still choosing to breastfeed.
Between 1950 and the early 1970’s the percentage of women who breastfed their children continued to decline, reaching the low point of 22 percent in 1972. That’s when it started to rise again. Today, 83 percent of mothers breastfeed their babies, at least initially.
Science turned things around. It was learned that babies, and mothers, were much better off breastfeeding. Babies digested human milk much better than cow’s milk or some other substitute. The mother’s milk also provides the perfect nutrition for the baby and strengthens the baby’s immune system, reduces the risk of allergies, improves the baby’s brain development, reduces the risk of SIDS, and lowers the risk of childhood obesity. The skin-to-skin contact the baby gets from breastfeeding also improves the mother/baby bond.
The mother benefits too. Breastfeeding reduces her risk of ovarian cancer and some breast cancers. It also reduces the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and type 2 diabetes. The risk of postpartum depression is reduced as well.
Breastfeeding is a great thing.
How about chestfeeding, is that a good thing?
The term, chestfeeding, seems to have appeared about 10 years ago. The first peer-reviewed study that I found was published in 2016, but the term obviously had been in use in the LGBT subculture before that. From what I can tell, the term applies to a range of practices.
Calling breastfeeding, breastfeeding, is offensive to some non-heterosexual biological women, some biological men who think they are women, and some who think they are neither male nor female. Those who are offended assert they should be able to call, what most of us consider breastfeeding, anything they want—chestfeeding, bodyfeeding, nursing (even though nursing is an old term), or whatever. Ok. That seems innocuous, right?
Wrong.
This is part of the left’s continuing effort to redefine everything. Breastfeeding is just the latest target. In some cases, chestfeeding equals breastfeeding. It’s just that the mother, birthing person, person with a uterus, or whatever they want to call themself or herself or himself objects to the term breastfeeding because it is not a neutral enough word.
For some, chestfeeding refers to a transwoman (a man) who cannot lactate naturally but still wants to chestfeed the baby. In those cases, chestfeeding refers to a practice of taping a tube near the nipple (breastfeeding or chestfeeding, it’s still a nipple). As the baby sucks, milk is delivered through the tube into the baby’s mouth. The milk could be pumped milk from the birth mother, shared milk from another woman, from a donor bank of human milk, or it could be formula. Supposedly the baby can’t tell the difference between milk from the mother’s breast/chest or milk from a tube.
In very rare cases, chestfeeding may refer to a baby who gets “father’s milk.” Father’s milk is milk that is produced artificially in a biological male who has received various hormones to grow mammary glands and produces milk. There are two possible drugs either one of which is key to the production of father’s milk. Both are banned in the United States because of the potentially severe health consequences. Even taking the hormones the man will never produce a supply sufficient to satisfy the baby’s needs. In the one case that was written up, the transwoman (a man) bought the banned hormone in Canada. She (he) was able to chestfeed for only 6 weeks.
If a transwoman (a man) wants to experience the joy of chestfeeding without producing milk or without using any other delivery system, they also could “dry nurse” the baby, according to experts.
What’s more disturbing than thinking about chestfeeding in general and more disturbing than describing the various practices, is realizing that our Center for Disease Control and Prevention, our premier health agency, is all in on this. What is wrong with them?
In their Health Equity Resources guide the CDC writes:
- Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed). The gender identity or expression of transgender individuals is different from their sex at birth. The gender identity of nonbinary-gendered individuals does not fit neatly into either man or woman.
- An individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed.
Indulging the LGBT community on this issue is not based on science. While it accommodates the fantasy of the adult, what it does for the health of the baby is questionable. For almost all of human history, children either breastfed or died. The breast milk was from his own mother or from a lactating woman who was willing to feed the child.
Milk from the baby’s own mother is the healthiest feeding alternative. The invention of formula gave orphaned babies or babies whose mother was sick a chance to survive. In the century after it was invented it became a fad to use formula. More and more women chose not to breastfeed. Science, real medical science of the kind CDC is supposed to embrace, shut down that fad with proof that breastfeeding is far better for the mother and the baby. Now it is recommended that babies be breastfed for at least a year.
Fringe activists within the nursing and medical communities, who have a political agenda, have foisted this “chestfeeding” type terminology, this experimentation with biological males lactating and breastfeeding infants, onto the rest of the nursing, medical, and hospital associations and institutions. Those within these communities are often loath to speak out against it out of fear of being fired or canceled.
Better to go along and get along, they think. Besides, isn’t it nicer to accommodate these troubled people? After all, anyone who is offended by such a commonly used term like breastfeeding, one that’s been used forever, must have been terribly traumatized somewhere along the line.
The problem is being nice, and accommodating the fantasies and delusions of the troubled, does not help them. It rewards their efforts to force reality to conform to their own image of what reality should be. It won’t stop with chestfeeding. In fact, chestfeeding is only the latest.
ChatGPT, one of the AI’s programmed with a progressive perspective, has a whole list of terms that are now considered insensitive and outdated. For example, I asked the program what the proper term for “sexual deviant” is now. I think the program was horrified by my question. It replied:
“the term ‘sexual deviant” is considered outdated and stigmatizing. Instead, professionals and advocates in the fields of psychology, medicine, and human sexuality tend to use more respectful and neutral language.
The proper and more contemporary terms to refer to individuals with atypical sexual interests or behaviors are ‘individuals with paraphilic disorders’ or simply ‘people with paraphilias.’ A paraphilia refers to a specific sexual interest or preference that may be considered atypical or unconventional. It is essential to approach such discussions with empathy and without judgment.”
Normal and abnormal are now “typical” and “atypical.” Homosexual lifestyle is now “sexual orientation” or “LGBTQ+ community,” mother is a “birthing person.” In case you don’t know what someone’s preferred pronoun is, instead of using he/she or him/her based on the way the person appears, you should refer to the person as they/them, according to the AI. If you don’t know for sure whether a person prefers “breastfeeding” or “chestfeeding” we are supposed to default to “chestfeeding,” the more neutral term.
Why? To be nice?
If neutralizing the language was innocuous, it might not be a problem. But it is not innocuous. Changing the language changes our perception of reality because language represents reality, it is how we describe reality. If it’s ok for biological men to breastfeed/chestfeed then why not find a way to allow men to lactate at will? What about all the experimentation underway to transplant a uterus into a man? It’s still animal experiments now, but sooner or later the goal is to transplant a uterus from a woman to a man.
Ultimately the goal of all this changing language is to normalize the idea that men can be women and women can be men. Currently, the surgery is only cosmetic, but the objective is to transplant all the equipment from woman to man and man to woman. In a very limited manner, there has been success in getting men to lactate.
What is disturbing is the CDC is just fine with that. They have endorsed it. Are they going to back more research into it? Are they funding the uterine transplant experiments?
It is also disturbing that the medical profession seems to be ok with it, too. Why aren’t the medical professionals—the nurses, doctors, researchers—standing up and saying this is crazy? The medical profession, literally, is endorsing, funding, and engaging in Frankenstein-like experiments. What the heck?
The CDC should be dismantled. They botched handling the Covid-19 pandemic, they actually funded the gain of function research that created Covid-19, they have inserted themselves into issues of gun violence, racism, and climate change, and they have become completely unaccountable to any authority. And they are incompetent.
Getting rid of the CDC won’t happen anytime soon, given the current administration’s embrace of all kinds of weirdness, but what we can do is refuse to go along with the new preferred language and the new reality being imposed on us. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. There is no changing from one to the other.
God created the world. It is God’s reality, not ours to change. Thankfully, there are signs that much of this redefinition of everything is just a social contagion that is beginning to self-destruct. An encouraging sign is a recent study that revealed that churches holding orthodox biblical positions are growing, while the churches trying to conform to our changing culture are dying. So don’t be sucked into the progressive newspeak.
Stand fast.
