Breastfeeding is "icky." Didn't you know?

The Leaky Boob posted this link on Facebook, and I had to share, because it highlights some important truths.

The article talks about Irish women (and doctors, and onlookers), but it applies pretty darn accurately to USians, no?

Some points of note:

Bottles and the infant formula inside them had to be better than anything a woman's body could make because you had to buy them. And Irish people like buying things.

Of course, we all know that if we buy it, it must be superior. The more expensive the better. That free crap that comes out of my boobs? Must be cat piss.

Oh, wait... except for this:

Breastfed infants suffer fewer tummy and chest infections, fewer urinary tract infections, fewer ear infections, less eczema and less asthma than bottle-fed ones. They have less risk of having diabetes, Hodgkin's Disease and possibly leukaemia. In adulthood, they have less chance of getting late-onset diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Mothers who breastfeed have less chance of developing pre-menopausal breast cancer, ovarian cancer and osteoporosis.

Huh. THAT IS SO WEIRD. Because, as we all know,

...anything a woman can do for herself isn't worth doing.

I mean, seriously, folks! Women are inherently inferior, remember?

Ladies, remember, the only thing your body is capable of is pleasing men sexually, 'mkay? And, really, nothing kills a cis hetero guy's mojo like seeing your boobs used for their God-intended purpose. Priorities, people!

I mean, how can you reasonably expect someone to NOT stare at something they find odd, unusual, or even gross? How can you possibly expect others to have enough self-control to look away of their own volition? As if they were grown-ups who knew how to solve their own problems?

Really, ladies! These people can't help it! They can't control who or what they stare at! Be reasonable, please, and stop being so selfish. Cover up. Your baby needs to learn to sacrifice hir needs for the comfort of others. (Especially if your baby is a girl. Let's get these lessons in early!)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go make a nursing cover. I want to make sure it looks nice, so I think I'll decorate it with images my husband's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. It has such pretty pictures, don't you agree?

Kitteh approves of breastfeeding.

This? A beautiful sight. PERIOD.

Related articles

• Surgeon General Urges Support for Breastfeeding (women.webmd.com)
• Surgeon General Pushes Breast Feeding (abcnews.go.com)
• Surgeon General: Breastfeeding Should Be Less Hassle (huffingtonpost.com)

6wS: I make milk. What's YOUR superpower?

Christina and Chrissie

I didn't watch the memorial service or the President's speech, either live or on YouTube. But I got the Twitter version. Lots of good quotes.

The death of Christina Taylor Green is a tragedy. For many reasons, and I'm sure several others have written about it much better than I can, so I'll let them do it (I'm sure you've read about it plenty already, anyway).

It would still be a tragedy even if she were not a cute white girl. A cute white cis girl.

Last night, as most of Twitter mourned the death of Christina, a few voices spoke up to mourn another tragedy: the murder of Chrissie Bates.

She was stabbed to death in her apartment. According to a neighbor, "Chrissie had mentioned that she had recently been sexually assaulted, and that her apartment window was broken. When she complained, management told her she would have to pay for the window herself."


Chrissie was a trans woman. Which the article feels need to be mentioned right up front, along with the name under which she was born. Because we have to point all that out. As @metalmujer said, "They killed her twice in the press."


Why can't she just be a woman? Why can't she just be "Chrissie"? Who cares what her name used to be? That's not what it is now. And there's a reason for that. Respect that.


But I guess it is fitting, in a morbid way, that the media harps on the fact that she was transgender, specifically a transgender woman, since that's the reason why she was murdered. 


I guess, also, that we should be grateful that the media (unlike the medical examiner or the police) is respecting Chrissie enough to call her Chrissie and call her a trans woman, and not a "gay man" as is usually reported. At least this time, they are calling the transmisogyny what it is: transphobia, not homophobia.


Chrissie is not going to get a televised memorial service, or a speech by the President. (She's one of the lucky ones, though... at least her death was reported, and her gender respected. Few trans women victims get that.) But that doesn't make her death any less important, or her murder any less tragic. Please take a moment to pray for Chrissie, for the loved ones she left behind, and for other women like her, so they do not meet the same fate.

Dear Anonymous

I wrote a post Saturday morning, and shortly afterward I received an email notification that you had left a comment.

I was busy over the weekend, with family who'd come in from out of town to see MonkeyBoy. I've also been having computer issues, so my online time has been limited to phone time (Saturday's post and this one are via phone; right now I'm phone posting from bed, while nursing a half-sleeping MonkeyBoy, because this is how most of my time at home is spent). I love my Blackberry, but it's a pain to post blog comments on it; I prefer to do that at the full-out computer.

That's part of the reason why it's Thursday morning, and I have still not responded to your comments. The main reason is that I hadn't eve read them until a few minutes ago.

I was purposefully avoiding reading your comments because I knew you would only say something vapid and inane. Smething petty and pointless. Something I had already heard plenty of times before. But, most importantly, something I had already responded to plenty of times before.

This gets old, Anonymous. Really.

The purpose of blog comments is to have discussion, debate. When you come in, all you do is call names and parrot talking points. BOOORING!

And useless.

So I'm disabling anonymous comments from now on. I'm done repeating myself. You don't add anything to this blog, at least not when you're hiding behind "Anonymous." Maybe, if you're made to sign a name (any name! No one says it has to be you full name! Or even YOUR name! Call yourself The Baby Crusader, or something, um, "clever" like that) to your pettiness, you may put some thought into it. Imagine that! Wouldn't that be nice...

I used to have the time to bang my head against walls like you. Not anymore, sadly.

Can't say you'll be missed. Sorry.

Feel free to come back, with a name (dude, it can even be a fake name, what do I care? How would I know? Just pretend!), some maturity, and something thoughtful to say.

Thanks,
Criss.

Parenting Choices, via MTV's No Easy Decision

(Phone posting, so please pardon the typos.)
(Edited to add Katie's info and make linky-links)
I TiVoed MTV's No Easy Decision, but haven't had a chance to watch it yet. Via Facebook, I found this blog post, by Katie, one of the girls in the show.

I almost can't believe a teen [edit: she's in her early 20s. STILL.] wrote that. She expresses herself better than I could (which was a blow to my ego... But I digress). I don't know how anyone can read that and think she did not "know" what she was doing, or that she did not "think her decision through." Does she sound like someone who needed a mandatory waiting period before being allowed to get an abortion?
Those of us who have made that decision have not come to it lightly. We knew what we were doing, and why.
I love what she says about the "mothering instinct" -- it starts at pregnancy, knowing whether you are ready, or even capable, of being a mother. "Mothering" starts with pregnancy, at that moment you decide you want to become a mother; with planned pregnancies, it starts even earlier. I made several choices about my diet, lifestyle, medications, etc. when Freddy and I started trying to get pregnant. I stopped drinking sodas (for the MOST part) and eating candy (and if you know me, YOU KNOW HOW MUCH OF A SACRIFICE THAT WAS), got off my "crazy pills" (though I quickly got back on them when I realized how much I needed them -- see, already making parenting decisions, for the wellbeing of the potential child growing inside of me), etc.
Parenting starts before birth, and it starts before conception. This is why we use birth control. Guess what? Birth control, like pretty much everything in life, is not infallible. Sometimes it fails, it doesn't do what it's supposed to or go the way we want it to. So we adjust: for some women, who are not ready to be parents, who are not ready to be pregnant, or who know they never want either of those, that means terminating the pregnancy.
When MonkeyBoy was born, my doctor ordered an echocardiogram to check out his heart, because of the "prominent aorta" they'd seen in one of my last sonograms. Thankfully, the echo showed everything was as it should be. But if it hadn't, if the doctors had found something wrong with MonkeyBoy's heart, guess what?
Freddy and I would have made a parenting decision and talked to the doctors to figure out the best way to "fix" it. We wouldn't have said, "Oh, well, must be God's Will! After all, He giveth and He taketh away, right?" and let the baby die.
God's Will, if you take the time to read Genesis, is for us to use the first gift He gave us: our free will*. That means making choices. Sometimes, that choice is abortion.

And that's okay. In fact, it's a responsible parenting choice.

*Edit: I was going to elaborate on the "free will" thing, but as I started writing I realized it needs to be a post on its own. So watch for that, coming soon.