Authors: DON'T Call Breastfeeding 'Natural'! That's Gender-Stereotyping!

P. Gardner Goldsmith | April 27, 2018
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Leave it to the leftists to claim they are all for “women’s rights” and “choice”, while lambasting those rights if a woman opts to behave in ways the leftists don’t like.

The latest really takes it to a new level. In a mind-blowingly tedious piece for the American Academy of Pediatrics Perspective, Jessica Martucci and Anne Barnhill tell the world that breastfeeding should not be called “natural”, because, get this, the word connotes “better”, and it reinforces “controversial” gender stereotypes.

Seriously.

The fact that study after study suggest that breastfeeding is not only healthier for the child – helping reduce the probability of allergies, potentially reducing the problem of eczema, improving long-term jaw-alignment, decreasing the likelihood of juvenile (Type One) diabetes, increasing healthy myelin formation (myelin is the protein sheath around all nerves that actually conducts the ions/electricity to make muscles move), and decreasing the risk of asthma – but that it also is physically and mentally beneficial for the mother? These are downplayed or lost under the Social Justice Warrior hammer-blows the authors smash upon the reader.

Yeah. At the expense of actually exploring the literal nutritional and medical importance of breastfeeding, it’s much more important to focus on the new spin… Breastfeeding reinforces “ethically troubling” gender role traditions.

To wit:

Coupling nature with motherhood, however, can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family…

Perhaps it was lost on these brilliantine, puritanical sophists, but it just so happens that we’re all mammals. We come from, shocker, mothers with mammalian glands that secret milk to nourish newborns. Motherhood is natural. If it were not, the human race wouldn’t exist. It just so happens that breastfeeding is biologically determined. Now, a new wave of so-called “feminists”, standing in the front lines of the Social Justice Warrior Army, want to say that calling breastfeeding natural supports a stereotype?

Breastfeeding is natural. The fact that women do it and men don’t is… natural.

But the authors aren’t done. Continuing the silent shriek, they write:

Referencing the “natural” in breastfeeding promotion, then, may inadvertently endorse a controversial set of values about family life and gender roles, which would be ethically inappropriate.

Somebody open a window.

Mixed into these politically correct lines is a “too-far-for-its-own-good” belief that takes the healthy idea that men and women should be able to choose their roles in life and relationships, and combines it with a pearl-clutching, fearful belief that “gender roles” are not really individual choices or biologically influenced. You should be able to choose what you want to do, but if you are a woman and you choose something traditional that we think reinforces a “gender stereotype”, you’re an ogre.

Somehow, the idea of breastfeeding as “natural” is forced on us by “society”. And, as we all know, society is a patriarchal, jingoistic, male-dominated hypnosis machine that forces women’s magazines on women, forces vapid daytime TV talk shows like “The View” on women, and, yes, forces women to take selfies in dirty mirrors while making duck-lip faces.

Choosing to breastfeed is the result of a male “social control” plot, just like all the other things women might voluntarily choose to do, because, heck, there just can’t be any biological connection to human behavior, especially after having a baby and experiencing the resultant physical changes in one’s body.

Nope. As a classic line in the film “Repo Man” mocked:

“I blame society! Society made me what I am!”

Yeah. Society made women have a different chromosome, made women generally capable of bearing offspring, and made females possessed of the power to nurse them after birth. And we all know men run society. Just ask Oprah.

We males must be very, very powerful.

To give the authors some credit, one of the things they criticize is the fact that various governments promote breastfeeding as a “natural” thing.

A breastfeeding promotion poster produced by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene describes breastfeeding as “Mom-made” as compared with formula feeding, labeled with a red circle that reads “Factory-made.”

But there is a difference between validly criticizing the unethical practice of taking tax money to promote an agenda – even if that agenda appears to be scientifically correct -- and criticizing the promotion merely because one thinks the content runs afoul of some grand “social justice” belief that “natural” shouldn’t be connected to breastfeeding.

It is natural. It’s not “gender-role” reinforcement foist upon people by a patriarchy. Get over your issues and stop making people try to live the way you want them to by accusing them of being “manipulated”.

That’s simply weak.

This is motherhood. It’s powerful. And, yeah, it’s natural.

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