The Final Frontier: Human Milk Without Mothers

A guest post from Mothers for Mother

Mothers for Mother (MfM) was a website started by disaffected La Leche League Leaders who could see that the LLLI Board was literally killing this venerable organisation by its insistence on using “a variety of terms” in place of mother. For over 65 years LLL Leaders have provided mother to mother breastfeeding support at no cost to the many thousands of women who contact them every year. LLL has literally changed the course of breastfeeding history, but is in grave danger of losing its credibility as Board members alter policies (largely without consultation) to include men and erase women.

It was necessary for Mothers for Mother to be totally anonymous as Leaders are not allowed to criticize LLL in any public forums. Leaders who complain (even in private League Facebook pages) are promptly bullied by gender woo warriors and threatened with being disaccredited. In the beginning, when MfM had a comments section, every Leader who commented was sanctioned/booted off committees or otherwise punished for their ‘insubordination’. Some Leaders are still fighting for their right to remain a Leader while at the same time holding gender critical views (AKA believing in facts and biology), while others have been removed for stating they are not prepared to support men breastfeeding.

Because of the level of secrecy required to operate MfM, this website has been taken down. Reprinted with permission of the Mothers for Mother authors I am republishing a series of their posts as a form of archiving them for future readers who appreciate the sanity of those who believe in biological facts, over the thoughts of those who posit that nothing is more important than what they feel or believe about a made-up world of their choosing.

This was first published on April 24, 2022

The Final Frontier: Human Milk Without Mothers

The world we live in has been totally commodified. Think of anything that you may want to do, have or become and there is a seller somewhere waiting to take your money to provide you with your heart’s desire. There is no service, item or experience that cannot be bought by someone with determination and money.

This applies not only to goods and services that have been bought and sold traditionally, but also to human interactions and relationships that were previously unavailable to many because of overriding factors such as biology or lack of scientific development. Now, if you decide you would like to have a baby, but you have no way of achieving this goal yourself, you can hire someone to gestate it for you. Don’t have any eggs or sperm of your own to use? No problem, these can be purchased from paid “donors” and placed in the uterus for hire.

Once you have your baby, how are you going to feed him/her? As mammals, evolution has designed a great system that has worked well since we were derived in the Triassic Period (about 252 million to 201 million years ago) from members of the reptilian order Therapsida. Mammals drink milk from their mothers, that mothers synthesize specifically for the consumption of their babies.

There have always been times where mothers’ milk is not available, most notably when a mother died giving birth. If there was not another lactating mother available, a baby had to be extremely lucky to survive. Human babies (like other baby mammals) have very specific dietary needs that are not filled by substituting the milk of a different mammal. Mortality rates for newborns in European foundling homes and orphanages were as high as 98% in the 1800s because babies need the milk from mothers to not just thrive, but to actually survive.

The use of the word “formula” for artificial baby milks is derived from its origins in the doctor’s offices, labs and pharmacies that worked together from the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s in a quest to find a suitable substitute for milk that mothers naturally produce on their own. These early attempts at mimicking breast milk were often quite complex concoctions of bovine milk, water, and various sugars that were constructed according to various arcane formulas meant to individualize them for each baby.

Breastfeeding fights back

By 1956 when the Founders of LLL came together to see what they could do to reverse this trend, the battle for “science” trumping women’s physiology was nearly complete in Western societies. Women entered hospitals when it was time for their babies to be born, were routinely drugged for labor, only met their babies many hours later and were not expected to breastfeed at all.

Those seven women were true pioneers and rebels in their time because they knew there was a better way to care for their babies and they quietly went about changing the world as it was in 1956. They started with nothing other than a woman’s way of knowing that they and their babies deserved better than what the science of the day was offering. The only research into lactation on record was in dairy cows, but as a result of the persistence of these bold women and their ever growing group of (mainly male) physicians and researchers, everything they practiced and promoted about breastmilk and breastfeeding was eventually found to be true and valid.

LLL empowered women to optimize their health and well-being through breastfeeding. It honored mothers, not in the condescending manner of popular culture, but through acknowledging and celebrating the tremendous power mothers have in promoting healthier and more productive societies starting with their own families. It respected the agency of babies as individual human beings with their own rights and autonomy as partners in the breastfeeding relationship. It honored the mother/baby dyad as the foundation of society.

“Queering” everything erases the truth

Queer theory is a Western philosophical concept that escaped out of academia and has captured wider society in nearly every aspect of government, business and society at large. Broadly speaking, the principles of queer theory are embodied in a belief that there is no such thing as objective truth and that everything is subject to oppressive language. This belief system posits that society cannot be changed for the better as is; that it needs to be destroyed (or “queered”) and out of this chaos and destruction a new world order will emerge that will lead to a golden age of equality and equity for everyone.

According to those who believe this, there is no such thing as biological sex. There are no women; there are “people with a cervix”, but some women have penises. This is how you get “lactating parent” and “breastfeeding families”. By desexing biological processes you dehumanize people and you make it easy to commodify the parts of life dependent on these processes.

If you “human milk feed” a baby, do you need a mother at all?

Transhumanism and transgenderism

Transhumanism is the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. Its main proponents are fantastically wealthy biological men who claim they are women because they are transgender.

Transgenderism predates queer theory, but they symbiotically co-exist in a parallel universe to where most people live. To be transgender is to live life in a constant state of performative fiction as you claim that you have “changed” sex. It is biologically impossible to change one’s sex. This is an immutable state, established at the point of conception and usually easily seen at birth by observing entirely differing genitalia. In less than 1% of the population sex at birth is ambiguous by observation, but chromosomal testing will show if a baby is male or female (which are the only two choices).

The differences between the two sexes are system wide, contained in every human cell and start in fetal development. Puberty greatly exacerbates the inherent differences between men and women and there are many differences between the two.

One major distinction in functionality is embodied in reproductive capacity. Men produce small gametes (sperm) and women produce large gametes (ova or eggs). Natural conception always takes place in the woman’s body and she is the only sex who can become pregnant, gestate and birth a baby that she can then breastfeed. Men can fulfill none of these functions. “Not all pregnant people are women” is an incorrect statement if you are talking about sex. If someone is pregnant, even if they have a beard and appear to be male, they are not. Attempts by transwomen to breastfeed a baby by inducing lactation have been unsuccessful to date.

Conversely, the tidal wave of young girls attempting to escape the over sexualized society we live in by electing to have their healthy breasts surgically removed to live as men is already leading to the situation of extreme grief and anguish when they find themselves unable to breastfeed their babies when they mature into a more comfortable state of being a woman.

The brave new world of lab produced “human” milk

Infant formula has come a long way since those early days of experimenting by doctors in their offices. This industry will be worth $104 billion a year by 2026 and over $5 billion per year is spent on advertising alone.

Despite the many changes in formulas over the last 200 years, there is still nothing that started in a cow or a soybean that even approaches what an average mother can do:

“An infant suckling at his or her mother’s breast is not simply receiving a meal, but is intensely engaged in a dynamic, bidirectional, biological dialogue. It is a process in which physical, biochemical, hormonal, and psychosocial exchange takes place, designed for the transfer of much needed nutrients, as well as for building a lasting psychosocial bond between the mother and her infant. Among mammals, breastfeeding has evolved over millions of years as a multi-tiered interaction to meet the biological and psychosocial needs of the progeny, enhancing its well-being and survival chances, as well as complementing the nurturing role of the mother. Thus, this unique, dynamic process benefits both the mother and her infant. Breastfeeding needs to be considered quintessentially as a continuation of the more intense, intrauterine dialogue, mediated through the placenta and the umbilical cord between the mother and her fetus.”

And the improved health of women who breastfeed their babies (in contrast to those who don’t) is in addition to what babies derive from breastfeeding.

But now on the near horizon is a new threat to women, babies and breastfeeding. Entrepreneurs are now making new foods out of animal cells in labs.

And lab cultured human milk is already past the ‘drawing board’ stage of production. Wilk and Biomilq are only two companies already racing to bring ‘human milk’ to the open market as an alternative to standard infant formulas and of course for those who “can’t” or don't wish to breastfeed their babies.

How do they do this? Well of course because their main purpose is to make large profits for their shareholders (like the existing companies selling formula), they are not going to go into detail on their public websites, but they make it clear that the starting point are mammary epithelial cells that are harvested from women’s breast tissue. This breast tissue comes from healthy breasts that have been ‘reduced’ according to one company, but because of the inherent secrecy there is no way to find out if they are also using breasts from young women who have had both breasts removed entirely.

And so, closes the perfect circle: societal pressure on girls and young women to conform to a standard of sexualized behavior that is rejected by them to the extent they voluntarily mutilate themselves using surgery and male hormones to avoid “being” women. As their brains finally mature into adulthood many of them later come to terms with biological facts and they have babies that they can no longer breastfeed. But hey, they can buy “human” milk!

And what is La Leche League's position in all of this?

Judging by what is in both the public domain and in the more private (Leader only) internet sites, it would appear that “the foremost global authority on breastfeeding” is happy to go right along with this.

By their insistent use of desexed and dehumanized language for a sexed activity, their insistence on using “a variety of terms” for the already totally inclusive term mother, their willingness to support research around lactation in males and recent discussions that breach the International Code of Marketing Breast-Milk Substitutes on talking to women about formula use for their babies, and the total shut down of any dissenting or questioning voices, the LLLI Board is demonstrating that the mother/baby dyad is no longer important to the organization. Board members have stated they are proud of the work they have done on “human milk” policies and these non-physiological processes that damage the breastfeeding relationship have been celebrated.

It is hard to go against societal trends. Those seven brave women who in 1956 stepped out of their expected roles as ‘housewives’ to found a global movement were brave indeed. Unfortunately, their modern equivalents, rather than standing tall and resisting the push to deny biology have hopped right on board the train that is journeying to an unknown and impossible future.

PS from Lucy Leader: Not much has changed since this was originally published, and the current LLLI Board majority is standing firm on promoting “human milk” and it would seem, supporting male lactation. If there ever was any doubt about the intentions of the original seven women who founded LLL, you can read here about the resignation of Marian Tompson who left the Board when no one would give her a straight answer to the simple question, “does LLLI support men breastfeeding?”

Is La Leche League International promoting pedophilia?