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This Is So Crazy
From the Daily Wire, a story about a transgendered, male-to-female “mother” being given a drug so she can breastfeed her adopted baby.
I will admit that when my first husband and I were beginning the process of adopting a fifth (!) baby, I thought about whether — should we get a newborn — I might be able to kick the ol’ yabbies back into gear and give the kid at least a year of mother’s milk. Naturally, I imagined it magically undoing any nutritional deficiencies or substance abuse issues that he or she might have been subjected to in utero.
So, maybe that was silly too?
But this seems actually crazy. Really crazy. Because, among other, lesser questions (aesthetic, psychological, social):
Published in Culture[W]hile we’re pushing the ethical envelope under the banner of transgender “rights,” are researchers considering the health and wellbeing of the child in question, who is now potentially at risk of the drug’s serious and sometimes fatal side effects?
Apparently not.
“While Reisman and Goldstein’s patient took her dose [of domperidone] orally, the FDA is reportedly still worried about the possible effects of domperidone on infants, since the drug is passed through breast milk,” notes Romper.
Domperidone has been banned in the U.S. by the FDA since 2004. “The serious risks associated with domperidone include cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest, and sudden death. These risks are related to the blood level of domperidone, and higher levels in the blood are associated with higher risks of these events. Concurrent use of certain commonly used drugs, such as erythromycin, could raise blood levels of domperidone and further increase the risk of serious adverse cardiac outcomes,” says FDA.gov.
Obvious insanity.
We are nowhere near the bottom. Still sliding.
There is the fantasy of “baby,” “child” and “parenting”and then there is the reality. That kid isn’t an adorable doll-baby, a blank-slate waiting to be reared as a pre-woke member of the Trans Community. That kid is a kid, which means that she is going to be walking around, witnessing, questioning, finding the faults in and objecting (at times strenuously) to the situation she has been born into. She’s going to be a real pain in the neck sooner than her “Mom” can possibly imagine. I know three year old girls who already know how to roll their eyes and slide in the verbal blade precisely where it hurts the most.
One day soon, that kid is going to look at her parent and say “Oh yeah? You’re not even a REAL girl.”
And… I have a friend whose mother took DES when she was pregnant with her. There was a chance that this contributed to the premature birth of the poor woman’s grandchild; she felt horribly guilty for years about that, even though she was completely innocent.
Here’s a “mother” (should I keep using quotes?) who was willing to expose a child to all the risks of a dangerous drug merely to have the chance to breastfeed and, presumably, feel like a Real Woman. By the way, does the hormone treatment necessary to keep Mom from growing a beard and a baritone also transfer through breastmilk? Ai yi yi.
And I remember doing agonizing cost-benefit-analyses when, as a nursing mother, I swallowed a Tylenol.
Yes, keep the quotes.
I would only ditch them if you were going to start saying emperically valid things like “here is a male”.
I don’t care about “psychosexual unfitness.” This one doesn’t have both of his oars in the water.
I haven’t read all the comments, is anyone else hear more interested in the domperidone aspect of this rather than the transgenderism? Lets ignore that aspect for a second.
Personally, I believe that parents (and all people) should be allowed to take risks whether the FDA is willing to take those risks or not. If a mom has trouble breastfeeding, understands the risks of taking the drug, and still believes it’s worth it, it seems to me it would be wrong to say they aren’t allowed.
What’s everyone else think?
I love “o’l yabbies” .
Great post.
The new born child is just like a piece of equipment—a prop for this person’s desire to have as close as possible to a female-and-now-a-mother experience. This attitude toward newborn human beings seems like the inevitable result of decades of legal abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
Sex reassignment surgery, and anything like this that goes with it, should be banned. It is quackery.
I have treated women with Domperidone (in the late 1990s) and other drugs to create lactation. It sorta works, you can convince the ol’ yabbies to produce a thin watery fluid, more colostrum than milk. The purpose here is not nutritive but rather to allow the emotional bonding with the baby that Mommy enjoys while nursing. I imagine that our LGTPQRSTUVWXYZ “Mom” feels the need for this bonding, too.
Kylez’ comment (40) is exactly correct. I’ve treated a roomful of these patients. They are all deeply disturbed, and the Doc who uses his surgical skills to mutilate them compounds the problem.
Some day I’ll tell ya about the Lady who was turned into a Man and then wanted to be a Lady again.
No, life isn’t fair.
Yup.
Presumably “Mom’s” testes are in the bio-trash at some local hospital. he then has to take estrogen, which passes into breast milk. So if the baby is a she, she may menstruate. At age 0. If the baby is a he, he may be feminized. At age 0. There’s other potential side effects too. Not a pretty picture.
No, life isn’t fair.
Dear Kate,
I don’t know what to tell you. However, increasingly, I feel that if Mary Shelly were alive today she’d realize that Frankenstein was warm milk compared to the stuff that now goes on every day. I wonder what the modern equivalent of the townspeople marching on the castle with torches and pitchforks is going to look like?
Sheeeessh!
Regards.
Jim
For the record, there are no mobs with torches and pitchforks marching on the castle in Shelly’s book.
Do we not have medical ethics anymore in this country? So these doctors can just give this person these drugs to accomplish something that their body should not have been doing in the first place? Do doctors have any oversight in regards to this type of thing? Why are they able to put the life of this child at risk for no medical reason?
The fact that this person was able to adopt this child in the first place is another issue entirely, but I don’t know why doctors would allow this treatment to be done.
I would agree with you in the case of a patient with a terminal illness or if were able to consent for their body only (and they would have to be an adult). But there is no medical reason to endanger not only the body of the breastfeeding person but the child as well. The child won’t starve, we have formula or donated breastmilk, so there is no medical necessity to risk the danger of the lives involved.
Amy,
For your information, I’ve read the original. It’s a lot bleaker without the torches and pitchforks. Hollywood always went for the happy ending so torches and pitchforks.
Regards,
Jim
Professional medical associations have completely fallen down on the job. Where was the AMA when too many docs were prescribing too many opioids? Or the psychological association when children too young to make such permanent life choices are “transitioned” to change their gender rather than diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder?
Mim,
This is a great question. As far as I could see, they resisted as best they could and then caved to the constant leftwing political extortion. The right meanwhile never expected that our social environment could be so relentlessly undermined. Thus they failed to provide a united counterforce to this madness.
Live and learn.
Regards,
Jim
Like most large organizations in the West, the AMA, Medical schools and most professional organizations have been captured by the Left.
This just seems like an extremely bad idea to me.
Here’s a question, @doctorrobert: if you had a mother who’d already nursed four babies, the last one relatively recently (e.g. within two years) would it take much to make the yabbies do their thing?
Although, even then—as I dimly recall—the milk a mother produces is suited specifically to her own baby, so for instance, my adopted baby wouldn’t have been able to get colostrum from me, just regular old breastmilk. “Might still be worth it,” I’d doubtless have said to myself.
But if I went to Doctor Robert and said “I want to breastfeed this adopted kid,” and Doc Rob told me the only way to do that would be to expose her to even small amounts of a dangerous drug…that would be and, I think, should be determinative: parenthood is, by definition, about the well-being of the child. Formula it is!
What does this “mother” think motherhood is actually about, I wonder?
It seems not. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
I find the idea of both gays and trans raising babies dehumanizing to the baby. You have to deny truth and reality to encourage and support this for the baby’s sake.
I don’t mind the idea of gay people raising children—I’ve known some wonderful gay and lesbian parents who adopted kids who badly needed a family, and the results were good. I do mind—always—lies, no matter who tells them. It wasn’t honest to lie to adopted kids, back in the old days, and not tell them they were adopted. It isn’t honest to pretend that a man can nurse babies. And it is really rotten to experiment with the lives of other, vulnerable human beings.
This sounds like another example of pushing on the string. Maternal bonding through breastfeeding has many benefits for the child and the mom. We men can ape this process, but forcing our kids to choke down colostrum so the “mom” can pretend “she’s” getting the full experience does radical harm to the child, the “adult,” the “family” (whatever that means here) the enabling doctor, and the larger community that enables this pathological charade.
While we’re on it, how many people who accept this behavior bristle at GMO’s?
Well, and lots of mothers who can’t (or don’t want to) breastfeed for whatever reason nonetheless manage to bond with their babies. Adoptive mothers being the obvious example (my long-ago vague plan to give it a shot notwithstanding). Heck, I was secretly pleased when, recently, new-mom friends supplemented breastfeeding with bottle-feeding, because it meant I got a turn to feed the baby.
This story seems so revealing, somehow, about the point of the whole project from the “mother’s” perspective: “she” wants to experience womanhood. She can’t. She is bumping up against the absolute and implacable reality of life in this universe, and there is pathos in this. Of course it is possible to delude yourself into believing that you can be a member of the opposite sex, just as you can convince yourself that you can speak to the dead, or recall a past life as an 18th century Chinese concubine. The illusion can be pretty powerful. Who among us hasn’t dreamed of flying—and doesn’t it feel real? (I love flying dreams; also “breathing underwater” dreams).
Absent pathology, it is what we call imagination, and it’s a good thing. It’s why men actually can understand women (up to a point) and vice versa, and why we can feel such sympathy for people whose circumstances we have never shared. It’s why “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself” makes sense. Not to mention that novelists couldn’t write their books without it.
I’m afraid that logic could run into some serious problems. “Medical necessity” shouldn’t necessarily be an enforceable requirement. If someone knows all the options and the risks and the costs, and chooses something you would never choose, I think we need to respect those decisions except in extreme cases. I don’t think putting a child in fairly indefinite risk rises to that level.
I didn’t say maternal bonding was exclusive to breastfeeding moms. I’ve bonded quite well with my children, but I lack the physiology to even pretend to experience female breastfeeding to a life of my shared DNA which I birthed, no matter how fancy the mask the “doctor” give me. A mother and birthed child, breastfed, have a unique physiological relationship. That’s not to say adoptive parents can’t profoundly bond with their children, and I LOVE the idea of adoption.
There’s a psychosomatic element to this mother-child relationship that is commonly obscured by more mainstream distractions like, well YABBIES, er, I mean, breastfeeding is it’s own domain of controversy, as every bloody thing now is a virtual signaling platform.
ps I missed if yabbies was a colloquialism for boobies, or crab fish, or what?
pss: I’ve used up my scare quote quota.
Ah—we agree then!
Yabbies appears to be a Drewism for boobies, Drew being my first (late) husband. I always thought it had something to do with his being from Tennessee?
We, TN is an interesting state. When I saw the word, I immediately referenced the magisterial Urban Dictionary. The only definition there makes no sense and has more down votes that up, so it’s a fevered controversy for sure.
Yabbies is euphonic, possibly onomatopoeic, thought that just might be my tinnitus.
Yabbies is wonderfully euphonic, this is my first encounter with the word and I love it.
Responding to Kate and Fred (51, 54), it would be no problemo to get a non-pregnant, previously lactating woman to produce real breast milk. It would require the right use of estrogen and one of several prolactin-stimulating drugs and especially, breast stimulation; give it a month.
But I don’t fault the “mom” for wanting to bond with baby. I do fault “her” for using these dangerous meds while “nursing”. and I do agree that it’s a charade.
We used to use the domperidone cocktail until the adopted baby was home, suckling then took over.