Recreational Lactation
Our Dude of La Leche?…On La Leche League and their embracing of male lactation and inclusion to the point of exclusion
“To You, lovely Lady of La Leche, and to your Divine Son, do I now dedicate this little baby whom our Father in heaven has given me. Grateful for the trust He has placed in me, I beg you to obtain for me the physical and spiritual graces I need to fulfill my duties at every moment. Inspire me with the motherly sentiments you felt during your days with the Child Jesus. Make it possible for me, in imitation of you, O Lady of La Leche, to nurse my child to perfect health. In all things help me to follow the example which you, as the perfect model of all mothers, have given to me. Let my family mirror the virtues of your Holy Family of Nazareth. Finally, I commend to your loving care all the mothers of earth, in whose hands He has entrusted the souls of His little children. Amen.”
*Prayer source
I am not a Catholic. I am not a Catholic and yet when I read the above prayer and gaze at the above statue, I feel what faith is supposed to feel like. I take comfort in the words because they feel familiar to me. Maybe I never have uttered them exactly, maybe I never even knew of them until now, yet the sentiment they express is one I have held in my heart time and time again. These are the sorts of words that mothers everywhere will recognize, because we want to be good. The sort of prayer that is written in our wombs as soon as we hold life regardless if we know these exact words.
“I beg you to obtain for me the physical and spiritual graces I need to fulfill my duties at every moment.” These are the thoughts of a woman facing the unknown. The unknown that comes with childbearing and childbirth and child rearing. No man can feel this weight.
“Inspire me with the motherly sentiments you felt during your days with the Child Jesus.”These are the thoughts of a woman who holds in her heart the desire to be good, to be a true light to her children, to be the warmth and steadiness and tenderness to them that they may not receive elsewhere in this world. Men play a different role in the lives of children.
“Make it possible for me, in imitation of you, O Lady of La Leche, to nurse my child to perfect health.” The fact that nursing is a part of this prayer in which the woman that is all women asks to be like Mary, to have the same sentiments she had while raising Jesus, to be filled with all that she need be filled with in order to be strong enough to build and birth and raise her baby-is so significant. These are the thoughts of a woman who knows that milk is more than food. Milk is a right of a baby, it is sustenance of body and spirit. It is a reciprocal relationship built on the purest love. This is a love men aren’t built to experience.
“Finally, I commend to your loving care all the mothers of earth, in whose hands He has entrusted the souls of His little children.” These souls are entrusted in women. In our wombs, to be born into our hands, to be brought to our breasts. The souls we bring into the world are, as stated here, entrusted to us. Entrusted! It is us, the mothers, who above all others, are ordained with this ultimate responsibility. Men hold different responsibilities to their children.
There is a reason this prayer is not to a man. There is a reason there is no “Our Dude of La Leche” prayers or shrines. The people who created that statue and wrote these words still had a grasp on the material world. That grasp today is loosening and wavering. One very relevant example is in the previously esteemed mother to mother support organization La Leche League beginning to utilize precious resources in the support of men who desire to lactate.
LLL got their name as a result of being inspired by the above mentioned shrine. Their name is taken from the title of a Spanish Madonna: “Nuestra Senora de La Leche y Buen Parto”, which means “Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk”. Funny how that title is the title of a woman, right?
I have written on LLL before (read it here), when I learned they were slashing away the “womanly” from the title of their canon text “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding”. I am again unfortunately motivated to discuss their crimes against the sanctity of motherhood after coming across a most concerning post on their Facebook group “La Leche League - Subgroup - Inducing Lactation & Relactation”, which I had joined quite a while back when my supply was temporarily dwindling.
The post was as follows (this study referenced here is in itself an entirely other post I will be working on in the near future):
“Hi everyone! I want to share a little bit about my journey.
I'm a transgender woman and my wife carried our baby, who was born in February of this year. I really wanted to co-nurse along with my wife and I was lucky to have a very knowledgeable and supportive doctor. We followed the protocol and I was able to make milk for my daughter from her first days. It has been one of the most wonderful parts so far of being a mom.
Trans women have been inducing lactation for a while but there are very few peer reviewed reports about it in the medical literature. So my doctor proposed that we write up a case study on my experience. I logged my milk production as I went along and saved a portion of milk, which was analyzed in a lab that specializes in human milk. The article was just published this week. It's the 4th-ever case study on a trans women inducing lactation, and the first of those articles to analyze HMOs in the collected milk.
For anyone who wants to read more, the article information is here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37910800/
I also have a PDF that I can share - feel free to message me if you want a copy. And if there are any trans women here who want to ask me about my experience, or if you know anyone else who fits that description, please reach out! I would love for my experience to help other women have the kind of wonderful experience with their babies that I got to have with mine <3”
I’m going to skip the obvious problem of a man being in a lactation support group and go straight to the meat of it-this man (and several others) are explicitly and warmly welcomed and absolutely fawned over by the women in these groups and their admins, who in this case, are La Leche League Leaders, accredited and signed off on by LLL. Not only are the men catered to, but if you dare speak out on their presence you are rapped on the knuckles for it or get the boot. I, as the reader may guess, am no longer a member of this group and in fact cannot seem to locate it anywhere. The following may be why:
Which in turn, resulted in this:
Shortly after, I was no longer able to search for the group at all. I am thankfully not currently struggling with milk supply or needing support for relactating. Those La Leche League Leaders who chose to shove me and my pesky feelings out the door of what should be a women’s only space (albeit a virtual one) don’t know that I’m not currently struggling or in need of help. Yet they were more than fine with protecting the feelings of a man over the needs of a lactating woman’s.
I suppose La Leche League is truly falling from grace. In turning their backs on the women like myself, they in actuality are turning their backs on all women. These small acts amount to a culture in which not only are some less cooperative women silenced, but the women who remain are falsely led to believe that the default position is always one of inclusion (to the point of delusion) and acceptance, even when it makes them uncomfortable. If they cannot see public record of other women’s dissent, will it not be more difficult for them to step into their own?
Women struggling with nursing are in a vulnerable place. Being desperate for advice, especially the niche advice of such particular groups (inducing lactation and relactating), makes women more likely to ignore nonsense and pretend to go along with things in their tunnel-visioned striving for help. When women are engaging in and seeking out such a resource for breastfeeding support, they shouldn’t have to tiptoe around voyeuristic male attempts at “sisterhood”, especially such as above, which is just blustering self importance poorly masked as pseudo concern for others. Those others being, of course, the other multitude of males in this same La Leche League run lactation support group. Enjoy a sampling of their inquiries to the group as follows:
In what world-universe-astral plane do men have a place at the table where breastfeeding women feast? A table where we, in my dream, voraciously fill ourselves with the fat of the land, pouring the Earth’s fluids into our own mouths so that our own milk-fluid may flow abundantly for our babes. A table where women cut one another’s meat, where we bring our lips to the same cup, where we gaze at one another over candle light- beholden at the beauty of the absolute metaphysical creative potential of each other. Where we are free to laugh inappropriately and be sentimental and tear up and smudge our lipstick and just be. Just be women.
This is why this makes me rage. It’s not just about a single Facebook group, it’s not just about pander-heavy inclusivity policies, it’s not just about group rules or book titles or special trainings or guidance on how to best make trans-identified people comfortable at support meetings-my rage is about other women abandoning women, throwing us to the wolves for not complying with their games, forgetting why they are there in the first place. Lactation support isn’t just about milk supply and latches and weaning-it is about seeing one another as fully actualized women who are integrating the female experience. In inviting men into that space, La Leche League is turning their backs to real women who need the witnessing required to work through hard motherhood moments.
It is more the silencing-effect than the silencing itself that is the true abomination here. When other women look at these pages and see nothing but other women, leaders included, tripping over themselves in subservience to the male in the lactation-room, what example does that set? It creates this sort of false culture, one that is built on petty internet policing by women who want to be the most nice.
To illustrate this, here are some examples of the sort of messaging from LLL leaders that is available to women seeking lactation support on LLL groups:
Further, I wanted to call attention to this post on the La Leche League International’s Instagram page, on which comments are turned off:
For an organization built on the the power of mother-to-mother support rather than defaulting to expert guidance, this sort of dialogue is a shameful strike to their reputation and legacy. No mother should be shamed for objecting to what should be a female-only space being infiltrated and seized by men with mental illness. No leader should allow such commandeering by these men and similarly should not practice it themselves (as seen in the above graphics). The fight for women’s-only spaces is a fight for female dignity and La Leche League is unfortunately on the wrong side of this fight.
LLL has, like so many others, fallen into political dynamics based on falsities that prioritize inclusion to the point of exclusion. I am focusing heavily on the mothers here, but I also want to emphasize the fact that this is also about babies. Are babies not being excluded here too? Their rights, their health, their foundation of emotional and mental wellness? To quote another social media post from LLL, in which they quote the United Nations High Commissioner:“Children have the right to life and to the highest attainable standard of health, of which breastfeeding must be considered an integral component."
La Leche League is not promoting the “highest attainable standard of health” (both physical and emotional) for babies when they encourage men to force themselves to lactate and then force babies to nurse at their chests.
Mothers milk is a sacred necessity that builds societies, “father’s milk” is a recreational novelty that crumbles them. No man has ever uttered such a prayer as the one to Our Lady of La Leche. No man prays to be able to make the milk that is more than just sustenance for their baby or to have access to their full physical and spiritual capacities in order to birth and raise children well. No man can pray for motherly sentiments because they have no worldly idea of what motherly sentiment is. This is not the prayer of men. This is the prayer of women. A prayer of women emblazoned with the name that is shared by La Leche League. A name that they are so foolishly desecrating in favor of the very few and in sacrifice of very many.
Oh good lord. I don't know where to begin with how nauseating this whole concept is to me, as a mom who breastfeeds both a 7 month old and a toddler right now. Whatever is coming from these men isn't milk, it's a side effect of pharmaceuticals that are rich in seed oils and solvents. That's not even close to the glorious substance my body builds for the babies that grew in my womb.
Thank you for taking the time to write this.
Emily, you are a star. The wokerati of LLL have all but erased women and mothers, in preference to using "a variety of terms" to describe us "gestators" who go onto become "lactators". To those of us who have complained to the LLLI Board about the mixing causes and mission creep (in the Olden Days, it was just assumed that supporting "everybody" to breastfeed meant every woman) that following a misogynistic ideology demands, we are just gaslit and told that this is not happening. When the new book "The Art of Breastfeeding" becomes the training manual for new Leaders, those not living in countries where 'everything goes' on the sex and relationship spectrum is legal will have to carefully consider their welfare if they choose to remain affiliated with LLL: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/what-is-a-duty-of-care
Refusing to disrupt the mother/baby dyad so that some dude can get his rocks off "affirming" his femininity is neither transphobic, nor bigoted, it is merely doing what is physiologically normal for a mammalian species. Who cares if males "can" lactate or not? Why is any effort at all going into such a damaging practice? Who does it benefit and who does it harm? https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/girls-can-do-anything-but-sorry-boys
I could go on and on (well I have actually), but kudos to you for directly pointing out what is happening. I would like to note however, that when LLL entities or LLLI is putting out public calls for donations from the general public, they manage to rediscover "moms" and lose all the "chestfeeding" jargon. So clearly someone in charge realizes that society at large is not nearly as "inclusive" as LLL is. I suspect that Our Lady of La Leche would agree with us about the status of women in relation to their babies.