I saw a thing on Twitter where someone mentioned a male coworker in his 50s wanting to know why, if there’s a baby formula shortage, women can’t just start expressing milk that can then be passed out to mothers in need.
sigh Homeschooling and religionists lobbying against educating children about the human body have resulted in a bunch of "grown ups" that know less than I did as a small child.
It’s pitiful and sad.
Dairy cows only make milk because they’ve had a calf that was then taken away by the farmer and replaced with machinery. That’s where veal comes from.
Without pregnancy hormones, the human body does not produce milk.
With a few shots of hormones, even a man can produce milk. By itself, unless there’s a pregnancy or something going on in the human body (likely cancer), milk does not just produce itself.
I phrase it like that because cisgender men need to understand that yes, even they can produce milk. So if they want to come up with "brilliant" ideas to help hungry babies, they can feel free to step up and do their part.
"But that would make me feel like a dairy cow or a woman!"–Well dude, unless you’re willing to make the sacrifice, you shouldn’t volunteer other people to do what you refuse to do. Your precious social masculinity be damned.
It sickens me to think that ignorant cisgender men are deciding what other people can do with their bodies when they don’t even know basic biology.
- Pregnancy hormones induce lactation. Someone feeds a baby or expresses milk with a breast pump, and milk continues to be produced. After a time without milk expression, the hormones shift, and the milk stops coming.
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People do not choose to menstruate, and have no control over how or when it happens. So yeah, everyone has a cycle, but it’s really more of a guesstimate as internal scheduling gets changed and shifted around by diet, exercise, stress, and illness. You guess that it’s going to be in a week, and it might actually be the week after that, and there you go: vacation ruined.
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When you are menstruating, you can’t just "hold it in." People are not choosing to ruin clothes and bedding because they’re being difficult or whatever ignorant men think. It’s not urine, and "squeezing as tight as you can" is not going to stop the blood from flowing. The uterine wall is shedding, and it’s going to come out whether you like it or not. Why? Because if it doesn’t come out, it rots in the body and you get sepsis and die.
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Menstruating people NEED more than 1 tampon or pad a day. Why? Because blood gets rancid as it ages (think of a pound of hamburger left in the fridge for a month), and if you don’t change a tampon regularly you can get toxic shock syndrome and die. And pads need to be changed because they can only soak up so much blood before they overflow, like a baby’s diaper can only hold so much urine. And yeah, you can get what amounts to diaper rash from having a bunch of unchecked wetness against your skin.
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A menstruating person should NOT depend on the rhythm method to prevent pregnancy, as they can still get "period pregnant" if they don’t time things right.
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Breastfeeding DOES NOT prevent pregnancy. I’ve heard people say stuff like that before, and it’s not true. That’s why there’s the old phrase "Catholic twins," which is when someone gives birth and then gets pregnant in the next month. Which, by the way, is REALLY UNHEALTHY. Like, you’ve just hosted a parasite that has absorbed all its nutrients from your body, and if you don’t have an excess, they take what you’ve got, and now you’ve got another on the way–which can result in a second baby that’s not as healthy as the first. The human body needs time to heal from the rigors of pregnancy.
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Pregnancy can ruin your teeth. The baby is drawing nutrients from your body, and you not having enough doesn’t stop them from sucking the calcium from your bones and teeth. There’s a reason why people get osteoporosis when they’re older, and it’s not just because "they didn’t drink enough milk" when they were kids.
Sometimes it happens that a person stops lactating even though they want to continue feeding an infant. That is not the fault of the person or the baby, it just is what it is.
There is a reason that baby formula was first developed, and it wasn’t just because of dead mothers and "women wanting to go back to work."
It was because sometimes a person simply cannot produce enough milk for their baby(ies). It is what it is.
"But what about goat/cow/chicken milk?"–Well, my dude, some of those simply are not feasible. Not just because somebody doesn’t have an animal that has recently birthed young, but because human babies need certain nutrients and animal milk is formulated for the young of that species of animal.
Baby formula is formulated to provide all the nutrients an infant needs. Taking a baby off breast milk and formula and replacing it with a gallon of whole cow milk DOES NOT WORK. Because sure, the baby will live, but they won’t have received the nutrition necessary for a healthy life.
Babies can go blind and deaf and suffer from HORRIBLE medical conditions tied to lack of proper nutrition. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a kid with bad teeth who needs glasses. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up with a kid that has bad teeth, bad eyes, bad skin conditions, neurological issues, fragile bones, organ damage, and stunted growth; IF THEY DON’T DIE.
The current baby formula shortage IS VERY SERIOUS.
So if you’re an ignorant asshat making jokes about starving babies right now, you need to stop and educate yourself because you’re not being funny. Your ignorance is making you not just be an asshole, but an outright HORRIBLE human being. As well as the butt of jokes as people realize that yes, you are being serious… seriously foolish.
Fix yourself. You’re the only one who can.
Pax,
~Harper Kingsley
