The Aunt Lydias of Birth and Breastfeeding

The Enforcers of Right Speak

The post below was written a few days ago and now it is time to share it here because an enforcer has contacted me in the comment section of my previous post. I guess the intention is to intimidate me so that I censor myself.

There is much to say about the intersection of birth and breastfeeding with identity politics. I’ve only just started.

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The coercive language change in birth and breastfeeding is not happening in a social vacuum. It is happening against a backdrop of a concerted and multi pronged drive to remove the words 'breastfeeding', 'woman' and 'mother' from everyday usage.

These basic, socially agreed upon words are now being removed from research and health literature, social policies, legal frameworks, training workshops, advertising, and the media, including social media. Women are being vilified for saying that we are not a person attached to a reproductive organ (uterus haver, vulva owner, person with ovaries, host body) or a person with a female reproductive process (bleeder, (chest)feeder, menstruator, lactator, labourer (ffs)). Body feeding has replaced breastfeeding in some quarters.

The more coy, ‘acceptable’ terms used by those who really believe they are being ‘additive’ and ‘kind’ are ‘people’, ‘person’, ‘parent’, ‘family’, ‘everyone’, and ‘you’ to avoid saying mum, mothers, and women. These are the ones used by the breastfeeding and birth charities, private doulas, IBCLCs, antenatal educators, and more. We see through the farce and sometimes when they face disagreement, the smiling mask drops.

And there are women who dissent. I dissent.

In response, other women are willing enforcers of this language erasure which has a very ugly, woman hating side. Women are groomed into pretending that it isn't also happening alongside putting men into female prisons, evicting women from homeless shelters for complaining about abusive men who have been welcomed in, and giving predatory men carte blanche for accessing female only spaces. In a free press, these travesties would not be suppressed never mind lied about as what has occurred at the WiSpa incident in Los Angeles. It is left to small web based outlets to report and contextualise what most of the mainstream media won’t. Women are also groomed into thinking that all medical staff, allied health practitioners, and community care workers are always honourable.

This totalitarian shift in language absolutely has real life impacts for women and girls. It absolutely has impacts for women who are pregnant, in labour, or newly post-partum. If we teach women to be too fearful to complain about others violating their boundaries everywhere else in life, how can they protect their boundaries from abusive breastfeeding counsellors, IBCLCs, midwives, antenatal educators, and doulas who display on social media that they will abuse women who do not agree with them.

Down that road obstetric violence lies.

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I’ve experienced coercive behaviours from midwives. There are doulas in the UK who are well recognised and who have verbally abused other doulas and birth support workers to silence when their opposition views are voiced. The bullying and coercion in the ‘caring’ professions mentioned above are appalling. Their new political commitment to gender ideology has exposed some nasty online behaviours that have been happening for years now within their private groups on social media. Only a small fraction of what is happening online is spilling into public pages.

Many of these women are in positions where they access vulnerable women everyday. As a lifelong gobshite, I was previously puzzled about why some women won’t complain when they have experienced poor behaviours from nurses, doctors, or midwives. Or when they fail to complain when their child has been mistreated by a member of staff at school. The response usually is, ‘I don’t want to make it worse.’ I am not puzzled anymore because too often the bullying does continue.

The breastfeeding charities need to evaluate their social media, discrimination, and safeguarding policies carefully. Your members’ behaviour online reflects your organisation. Safeguarding not only for protecting vulnerable women and babies but to protect the charities and their volunteers too.

The impunity with which the aggression flows out on the screen is pretty remarkable when considering these members are frequently coming in contact with vulnerable mothers. Does the smiling mask drop when a mother disagrees with a health care worker? Do mothers know their place out of fear of retaliation?