"Many divorcing Moms throw up all sorts of reasons why they alone must have sole physical custody, or limit a father’s parenting time to an absolute minimum, for a nursing child."

"Thousands of children have thrived and grown exclusively on formula, while the supposed benefits (smarter children, healthier babies, more serene mothers) do not always hold up to scientific scrutiny."

A website for a law firm called "The Firm for Men" is quoted in "In child custody dispute, breastfeeding mom is ordered to use bottle 'It’s about using breastfeeding as a weapon against visitation,' said a lawyer for the baby’s father" (WaPo).

The most-liked comment over there is: "If that man really cared about the child he wouldn’t try to make the infant adjust to his convenience. The man must come first! His indifference to the needs of the infant should be a giant red flag. He’s not showing love or care for her. It’s a power play. It’s sickening that the law comes down on a mother and child. That baby is not property!"

I wonder why this is the first time I'm noticing this basis for fighting over child custody. How do people work this out?

"I thought [breast-feeding] was supposed to be this beautiful bonding ceremony where I would feel like I was sitting on a lily pad in a meadow and bunnies would..."

"... gather at my feet while the fat-Hawaiian-man version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ would play. No! It’s not like that at all. Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now."

Said the comedian Ali Wong, quoted in "Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created." That essay, in the NYT, is an adaptation of the book, "Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood," by Chelsea Conaboy.

Conaboy writes:

"In recent years, a growing number of medical and public health groups have introduced public awareness campaigns warning people to drink with caution, noting that alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of cancer, behind tobacco and obesity."

From "Should Your Cocktail Carry a Cancer Warning? As pandemic disruptions lead many of us to drink more, experts underscore the link between alcohol and disease" (NYT)(the article is featured on the front page of the NYT right now, but it was published in 2021).

There's not too much talk about alcohol causing cancer, but there's even less talk about obesity causing cancer. In fact, I don't believe I'd ever heard that obesity can cause cancer, and yet, apparently, it's the second leading preventable cause of cancer.

The article is about alcohol as a cause of cancer, so I had to look up what cancer is caused by obesity. Here's what the CDC has to say. It lists "13 Cancers... associated with overweight and obesity":

Meningioma (cancer in the tissue covering brain and spinal cord)
Adenocarcinoma of the esophagus
Multiple myeloma (cancer of blood cells)
Kidneys
Uterus
Ovaries
Thyroid
Breast (post-menopausal women)
Liver
Gallbladder
Upper stomach
Pancreas
Colon and rectum

This is a huge deal, but we don't hear about it — presumably because it's strongly believed that telling people to lose weight only makes it worse.

Look at this CDC graphic (from 2016) — it's so governmental and tragic:

"With particularly dystopian flair, the formula shortage came to a head around the same time that a draft opinion leaked from the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade."

"On one hand, women would be forced to birth children. But on the other hand, once those children arrive, there might not be food to feed them. A footnote from Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that gained some traction this week was about adoption. The footnote quoted a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had noted that the 'domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.' The inclusion of the study in an opinion that would overturn Roe seemed to suggest that there was no need to have an abortion as there were plenty of American couples who wanted children but not enough American babies for them to adopt.... [W]hat it tells me is: You have no idea. No idea how hard pregnancy is on a body. No idea that don’t worry, you can give it away does not respond to the reasons that many abortion seekers might be seeking abortions to begin with. The opinion’s biggest problem isn’t that it was cruel, it’s that it was incurious. It did not attempt to understand pregnancy or motherhood. It was the 98-page equivalent of, 'Why don’t you just embrace your womanhood and nurture your children?'"

From "A lot of powerful people seem to have no clue what motherhood means/The formula shortage is a reminder of why being a mom — even when it’s a choice — is hard in ways some powerful people don’t seem to get" by Monica Hesse (WaPo).

"Across the country, many mothers say they are rationing food for their babies as they search for more formula."

"Some are driving several hours, only to find more empty shelves. Online, private sellers are gouging prices, marketing cans for double or triple their normal price, and many large retailers are sold out altogether. Since the shutdown of Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis facility, other manufacturers have struggled to quickly increase production because their operations are geared toward a steady level of consumer demand, according to Rudi Leuschner, an associate professor of supply-chain management at Rutgers Business School. 'Some industries are very good at ramping up and ramping down,' Dr. Leuschner said. 'You flip a switch and they can produce 10 times as much. Baby formula is not that type of a product.' On top of the broader supply-chain issues that have emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, such as labor shortages and difficulty securing raw materials, the problem may be compounded by panic-buying, Dr. Leuschner said. Abbott Nutrition said it was doing everything it could, including increasing production at its other U.S. plants and shipping products from its facility in Ireland.... Some parents are researching homemade infant formula recipes on the internet, although health experts have warned that such formulas can lack vital nutrients or present other dangers."

From "A Baby Formula Shortage Leaves Desperate Parents Searching for Food/Some parents are driving hours at a time in search of supplies. Others are watering down formula or rationing it, hoping for an end to the shortage" (NYT).

Is President Biden doing anything to help? I searched the page for "Biden" and all I came up with was:

Republicans have seized on the widening anxiety among parents to blame President Biden, arguing that the administration has not done enough to ramp up production. On Tuesday, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, asserting that federal officials have been too slow to respond.

Is that the President's argument, that Republicans are politicizing something that he's helpless about? I suspect that if Trump were President, the NYT would craft its language to blame Trump. 

I'd like to hear more about the homemade formula recipes? I looked and saw things that I know my own mother followed in the 1950s, with the key ingredient of canned evaporated milk. The NYT article conveys a warning that "such formulas can lack vital nutrients or present other dangers." Can? What nutrients can be missing? What dangers are there? How about printing the best recipe for homemade formula? 

Breastfeeding is discussed in the article, but the NYT puts a social-justice spin on it:

The shortage has been a challenge for families across the country, but it is especially palpable at grocery stores and food banks in San Antonio, a Latino-majority city in South Texas where many mothers lack health insurance and work at low-wage jobs that give them little opportunity to breastfeed.

You'd think that would activate Biden and the Democrats! 

"The average slave gave birth multiple times during adolescence, and then was forced into forced labor about two weeks later. So, this idea that there's space for Black women to rest..."

"... and heal and bond with their baby, that's been completely devalued throughout the history of our society. We actually have never recovered from that. You have to have a conscious conversation about what does it look like to recover and reclaim. It means, yeah, breastfeeding, but it also means having the financial reality and the housing and the employment support and the space and the equipment to pump and the different things that you need to support you in breastfeeding."

Said Ali Muldrow, Co-Executive Director at GSAFE (an organization concerned with LBGTQ+ youth), quoted in "Contributing Factors in Black Parents Breastfeeding" (Wisconsin State Journal).

"I wish the whole framework that we thought about breastfeeding changed. And I think seeing breastfeeding as this divine right — to take care of your baby and seeing yourself and your body as something that you are in charge of — I think is something Black women are denied aggressively. This conversation about whether or not black women are choosing to breastfeed is the wrong conversation. This is not a choice."

Things garnered recently.

"The racial breastfeeding gap has garnered tremendous popular and academic interest in recent years." 

I'm reading "The Real Reason Black Mothers Are Being Pushed to Breastfeed/Efforts to close the racial breastfeeding gap are more complicated than they appear" (NY Magazine). 

"Instagram ads tend to focus more on warm images of cooing babies cuddled by radiant, fully covered mothers and less on the agony..."

"... of aggressive feedings and the mess of midnight cleanups. The disconnect can leave first-time parents underprepared during a transitional period often described as the fourth trimester...." 

From "On TV, a Rare Realistic Look at Breastfeeding/A commercial from the parent products company Frida, to be broadcast during the Golden Globes, is part of a wider effort to show the struggles of the 'fourth trimester'" (NYT). 

Here's the 30-second ad that aired during the Golden Globes.

Frida worked with the network on a 30-second edit that blurs or covers nipples that are visible in the original 75-second ad — a “fairly robust editing process at NBCU’s insistence,” said Chelsea Hirschhorn, the company’s chief executive, in a statement. She added that the point of the ad remained intact — “that the physical and emotional breastfeeding journey puts an unrivaled pressure on women to ‘perform,’ and no longer should women be expected to prioritize making milk over their own physical discomfort.” On YouTube, the original ad, which was posted on Feb. 24, already has more than 1.4 million views. 

Here's that 75-second ad, where you will see nipples. You'll also see women in the shower trying to massage their clogged lactating breasts with the handle end of an electric toothbrush and the front end of dildo vibrator.

By the way, do you know what the NYT meant by "aggressive feedings"? I'm presuming the aggression is on the part of the baby. 

And do you like that term "fourth trimester"? I can see that it's been around for a while, but this is the first time I've noticed it. The message — as I hear it — is that the mother's body and the baby's body are still a single unit. Your body is not yet all yours again. The baby is still sharing it.

"This man was cupping my breast and swirling it all around, he was going to cut it off, along with the other one, in a few hours...."

"Cold in this man’s hand, they were beautiful. Historically, they were the most complimented parts of my body, aureoles dark as my grandmother’s face, a gift from her that I was supposed to empty into a baby’s mouth.... A few years after I had surgery, I was at the $20-for-an-entire-day spa in Los Angeles’s Koreatown and a woman who’d been eyeing me for the better part of an hour cornered me to ask if mine was the same surgery that Angelina Jolie had. The best I could do that moment was 'sure.'"

From "Editing My Body/'I’d just signed the form that said "paid: $6,043.00/male reconstructed chest"'" by Emerson Whitney (New York Magazine).

"So there is not the least bit of concern for what goes into the baby's body when being nursed by a man who has been pumped full of hormones?"

"It's now just another frontier of 'equality' to ensure that men can breast feed? I am appalled at the narcissism at the heart of this experiment, as well as the contortions that trans people put everyone else through in order to accommodate their feelings (non-gendered bathrooms, reinventing pronouns, etc.)."

A top-rated comment at "Are We Ready for the Breastfeeding Father?/He has intrigued and disgusted for millenniums. He has also remained largely hypothetical, until now" (NYT). The article features an illustration of hairy chested man breastfeeding a baby. Hair in the baby's food!

The article reports on...

... a peer-reviewed case report confirmed that a transgender woman, assigned male at birth, [who] was able to breastfeed her child after she was put on a regimen of hormonal drugs..... Before the treatment, the patient had been receiving feminizing hormones for six years. We don’t know how long it would take for a cis man to induce functional lactation. But “we have a pretty good idea of the types of hormone cocktails that would be needed,” said Tamar Reisman, an endocrinologist with the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and one of the two authors of the case report....

“I just thought, ‘How cool if it would work!’” Mr. Bengtsson said. “Just imagine the extraordinary consequences it could have for our society.”

The article collects some interesting material on the subject of tales of men who were able to breastfeed (without any servings of "hormone cocktails"), not that you'll believe they were true:

In the fourth century B.C., the philosopher Aristotle noted that some men were able to produce milk by squeezing their breasts. In the King James translation of the Bible, the breasts of the malnourished Job are described as full of milk. Later, in the Babylonian Talmud, we find a story of a widowed man whose “breasts opened and he nursed his child.”...

By the end of the 19th century, the American physician George M. Gould and his colleague Walter L. Pyle listed, in their book “Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine,” a number of instances of men suckling infants, including an unverifiable report, relayed by 16th-century missionaries in Brazil, claiming “there was a whole Indian nation whose women had small and withered breasts, and whose children owed their nourishment entirely from the males.”...

The author continues:

What is startling, when we dig into the history, is just how many great minds, from Aristotle to Darwin, have earnestly, and without judgment, pondered the question of men’s breast milk...  [I]n Marge Piercy’s 1976 sci-fi novel, “Woman on the Edge of Time,” in which a woman named Connie is transported into the future — the year 2137 — where she sees a bearded man breastfeeding a child. She notes that he has breasts, “like a flat-chested woman temporarily swollen with milk.” Connie is angry at first: “How dare any man share that pleasure?” she thinks. But in the end, the world depicted in the book is ultimately intended as a gender-free utopia....

If you want a gender-free utopia and you're willing to do artificial things to get there, why not just do what was already happening in America in the 1950s, switch to bottle-feeding formula. Both parents can do that. But the transgender movement isn't about making gender less important!

"I started keeping a log of funny things said, including, 'I saved some for Little Goo' (her sister), and 'can I have some mau to warm me?'"

"It turned out something I was initially ashamed of doing ultimately felt normal. Her current vocabulary for it is 'Mom can I have a teeny?,' as in 'a teeny sip.' When she asks for 'more teeny' it sounds exactly like 'martini' — to her, it’s always five o’clock somewhere.... What if more of us came out of our boxes and shared our stories? We’d evolve past harmful judgment — and have a few more laughs."

Writes Liza Monroy in "Breast-feeding a 3.5-year-old isn’t creepy, it’s hilarious" (WaPo).

"[T]he temperature setting in most workplaces is calibrated to men’s metabolic rates, so women are often uncomfortably cold..."

"... especially when the air conditioning kicks in. Or that until recently, even the White House did not have enough lactation rooms for the moms who wanted to work there. These are unfortunate realities that shouldn’t be ignored.... This week’s news from NASA reminds us why it’s so critical to talk honestly about the lasting legacies of a gender-biased era — the 'little' things that will affect the daily lives and careers of women for decades to come. When we don’t, it turns out that even the world’s best rocket scientists can forget that spacesuits were originally designed and built for men. Our girls — tomorrow’s astronauts — deserve better than that."

From "What the Failed All-Female Spacewalk Tells Us About Office Temperature/In a for-men, by-men world, the little things still really do hurt women" by Marisa Porges (who flew jets in the United States Navy and now heads an all-girls school)(in the NYT).

"I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver."

"I felt very vulnerable, because I can work out, I can eat healthy, but I can’t change the fact that both of my kids enjoyed the left boob more than the right. All I wanted was for them to be even and for people to stop commenting on it."

From "Gisele Bündchen Reveals She Got a Boob Job After Breastfeeding Kids — but Instantly Regretted It."

"When I woke up, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I felt like I was living in a body I didn’t recognize," but her best husband in the world, Tom Brady, said "I love you no matter what," and that taught her, "What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger."

I'm blogging this as refreshment from other, more dire problems afflicting women. Body image can be troubling for many of us, but this is Gisele Bündchen, famously beautiful, rich for her beauty, married to a beautiful man who is rich for his physical prowess. You don't get any more beautifully elite than her. She was always praised for her body, and that creates an exquisite problem: other people expect you to have a beautiful body, and they notice and talk about little things that have gone wrong, things that for all her hard work on her body — exercise, eating right — were something she could not control. Two babies enjoyed the left boob more than the right. It's those outside forces, the people with their expectations and the babies with their left-boob preference, that drove her to seek outside help. In search of perfection, she got the surgery, and surgery, she learned, is another imperfection, an alien imperfection. Better the unevenly sucked breasts than the surgically invaded ones! But she learned. She learned through the wisdom of her gorgeous husband and the hoary old aphorism that maybe he taught her or maybe she found for herself:

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Now, back to Christine Blasely Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. Did what didn't kill them make them stronger?

ADDED: If you Google "What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger" (or "What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger"), you don't get a lot of interesting stuff about Nietzsche and the uses of his aphorism, you get a screenful of stuff about Kelly Clarkson and her hit song "Stronger." If Nietzsche weren't already dead, it would make him stronger, presumably, to see that.

"Today, in the internet age, anyone can be a Nigerian prince. In Mr. Abel’s time, however, the hoaxer’s art — involving intricate planning..."

"... hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.... Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA — which sought 'to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches' — began in 1959.... Over the next few years, the organization’s activities (including a 1963 picket of the White House by Mr. Abel, who demanded that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, clothe her horses) were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News.... Then there was Omar’s School for Beggars, a New York City institution founded amid the recession of the 1970s, which claimed to teach the nouveau poor the gentle art of panhandling.... the subject of credulous coverage by many news outlets, including The Miami Herald and New York magazine.... There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass 'fainting' of audience members during a live broadcast of 'The Phil Donahue Show'; his 'discovery' (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises ('For people who wanted to expire in luxury,' Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding....  To some observers, Mr. Abel’s antics were a Rabelaisian delight. To others, especially members of the news media who had been taken in, they were an unalloyed menace."

From "Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94" (NYT).

"Seal milk is the heaviest, 53.2 percent fat, whereas human is 4.5 percent. Instead of passing out bottles, French orphanages..."

"... once distributed goats and donkeys for 'direct feeding.' (Kurlansky mentions an 1816 German book called 'The Goat as the Best and Most Agreeable Wet-Nurse.') Of course, the preferred wet nurse was usually human, but even then you had to be careful. Many believed a baby would take on the nature of whomever she was suckling. ('It was thought that a baby who suckled a goat would become very sure-footed.') 'A study in Berlin in 1838 compared the composition of milk from brunettes, blondes and redheads,' Kurlansky writes, 'and claimed to show definitively that redheads had the worst milk and brunettes the best.'"

From "A History of Everything, Served in a Cold Glass of Milk" a NYT review of the book "MILK! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas" by Mark Kurlansky. Kurlansky is the author of other books that take one product and run with it: "Cod," "Salt," and "Paper."

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Human–animal breastfeeding"...

Animals were used as substitute wet nurses for infants, particularly after the rise of syphilis increased the health risks of wet nursing. Goats and donkeys were widely used to feed abandoned babies in foundling hospitals in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. Breastfeeding animals has also been practised, whether for health reasons – such as to toughen the nipples and improve the flow of milk – or for religious and cultural purposes. A wide variety of animals have been used for this purpose, including puppies, kittens, piglets and monkeys.

... with this photograph:



Hey, I have my own picture:



Back to Wikipedia:

The suckling of animals by infants was a repeated theme in classical mythology. Most famously, twin brothers Romulus and Remus (the former founded Rome) were portrayed as having been raised by a she-wolf which suckled the infants, as depicted in the iconic image of the Capitoline Wolf. The Greek god Zeus was said to have been brought up by Amalthea, portrayed variously as a goat who suckled the god or as a nymph who brought him up on the milk of her goat. Similarly, Telephus, the son of the demigod Heracles, was suckled by a deer. Several famous ancient historical figures were claimed to have been suckled by animals; Cyrus I of Persia was said to have been suckled by a dog, while mares supposedly suckled Croesus, Xerxes and Lysimachus.

"I can’t technically take maternity leave. Because if I take maternity leave, then I won’t be allowed to sponsor legislation or vote during that time period."

Says Tammy Duckworth, the pregnant Senator.

Key word, "technically." When Senators want personal time, don't they just take it? I can understand a politician wanting to purport to exemplify problems that everyday people have, but Duckworth doesn't have the problem of needing authorization to take time off from work to deal with childbirth and the care of a newborn.

There's also the breastfeeding question:

“You are not allowed to bring children onto the floor of the Senate at all,” Duckworth pointed out. “If I have to vote, and I’m breastfeeding my child, especially during my maternity leave period, what do I do? Leave her sitting outside?”

Obviously, you bring the baby onto the Senate floor and everyone loves it (or acts like they do). It's about like the way they'd deal with the no-dogs-on-the Senate floor rule if there were a blind Senator with a seeing-eye dog. Everyone would instantly and automatically understand that there was an implicit exception to the rule. This is like the first-year law-school problem of the sign that says "No motor vehicles in the park" and the question whether a paraplegic in an electric wheelchair can go in.

But I'd love to see a Senator try to bring an emotional support animal— perhaps a bichon frise — onto the Senate floor.

Attempted coinage fails, as I discover "mactation" is an existing (though rare) word.

For some reason, we were discussing the topic of male lactation.

Anyway, "mactation" is "The action of killing, esp. the slaughtering of a sacrificial victim" (OED). To go back to 1563: "The Lambe of God..of whose mactation Isayas fore prophecieth." And in the 20th century, there's T.S. Eliot: "If the mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations, Are now observed."

Don't those Ivanka haters know about Mother Ginger in "The Nutcracker"?

I'm reading "'So creepiness runs in the family?' Twitter users slam Ivanka Trump for sharing 'gross' photo of her children playing 'peek-a-boo' under her dress.... She shared a photo of Arabella, six, Joseph, four, and Theodore, one - attempting to hide under her flawless red, floor-length gown/Critics called the photos 'creepy' and 'gross'...." (at The Daily Mail).

'Oh good lord, there is so much wrong with this picture,' one Twitter user wrote. 'Are you seriously so utterly tone deaf than to post a picture of boys looking up your dress?'

I'd say the haters are tone deaf. It's Christmastime. The first thing I thought of when I saw that picture was the great Christmas classic "The Nutcracker." Look! It's Mother Ginger:



I wonder how these fools react when they see a mother breastfeeding. So twisted they're missing the beauty of motherhood and the innocence of children.

It makes me think of the old Anglo-Norman maxim, Honi soit qui mal y pense — "May he be shamed who thinks badly of it" or "Shamed be he who evil of it thinks."

According to historian Elias Ashmole, the foundation of the Garter occurred when Edward III of England prepared for the Battle of Crécy and gave "forth his own garter as the signal." Another theory suggests "a trivial mishap at a court function" when King Edward III was dancing with Joan of Kent, his first cousin and daughter-in-law. Her garter slipped down to her ankle causing those around her to snigger at her humiliation. In an act of chivalry Edward placed the garter around his own leg saying, "Honi soit qui mal y pense. Tel qui s'en rit aujourd'hui, s'honorera de la porter."

A disastrous effort at answering the question "What are breasts for?"

Wtf? From the @Usborne book 'Growing up for Boys': Girls have breasts for two reasons - feeding babies and looking grown-up and attractive. pic.twitter.com/r1I34eLlvK

— Man vs Pink (@ManVsPink) August 27, 2017

That simple tweet from Man vs. Pink (AKA Simon Ragoonanan) led the publisher not only to apologize profusely but to pulp the entire edition of the book, as reported in "Boys Puberty Book is Pulped After Aging Badly" (NYT).

“We recognize that we have made a mistake. For this we apologize and reiterate that the material will be revised. Our remaining stock will be removed from the warehouse and pulped,” the publisher said....

What exactly is wrong with the simple/simplistic presentation, intended for youngsters? Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and the president of New York’s Child Mind Institute, said:

“It’s an unfortunate statement for a few reasons. One, the audience the book is written for by and large won’t make that shift between scientific fact and humor and, two, if they read it concretely it reinforces the stereotypes we have about boys and girls. It’s a rare pre-pubertal young man who can read a book that is on advice or science and be able to shift from memorizing scientific fact to recognizing something that is tongue in cheek. We do know that young kids are particularly concrete.”

The NYT has no comments section for this article, unfortunately. I'd love to hear some discussion, because I think this is a big overreaction, which ironically shows that adults lack a sense of humor and are uptight about sex. From an evolutionary standpoint, the 2 "reasons" make simple sense, don't they? Are educated, modern people afraid to face up to evolution?

Now, morally, philosophically, and psychologically, it's important to tell young people that their bodies exist for themselves, not to serve the purposes of other people. If you're a person with breasts, you can keep them to yourself if you want or you can choose, if you decide to have a baby, to breastfeed it. You can choose to dress in a way that hides your breasts if you want. It's up to you. There's no purpose you need to fulfill. But this controversy is about a book for boys, and (leaving the transgender question to the side) that means it's about somebody else's body parts, and these boys are going to need to learn to balance their enjoyment of feminine beauty with respect for the independence of the other person.

"We heard from new moms who pump as they sit on dirty floors in storage rooms and watch as roaches scurry in dark corners."

"We heard from teachers who pump during a short free period in their classrooms that don’t lock, one with a video camera recording. And then there was this nightmare: 'The CEO of the company used to announce when I was going to pump by singing a little song for everyone to hear: "Pump, pump, pump it up!"' wrote a woman who worked in a Silicon Valley tech start-up. She also recalled a time when she wasn’t permitted to leave a meeting and her milk began to leak through her shirt. (She quit and recently began her own consulting company.)..."

From "Workplaces must give moms space to pump breast milk. Women share what it’s really like" (WaPo).