When I saw the headline about men breastfeeding, my eyes nearly popped out

Sometimes you wonder if your senses are deceiving you. The eyes nearly fell out of my head a week ago when I saw a front-page headline on the Irish Daily Mail: ‘HSE Defends Forum with US Expert on Men Breastfeeding.’ I turned away. But when I looked back the headline was still there unfortunately, befuddling as ever.

The Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland (ALCI), which gets €100k a year from the HSE, was planning a conference for this October in Galway’s Ardilaun Hotel featuring an American called Jacob Engelsman. He would give a talk on “lactation support for gender-diverse families”. Struggling to make sense of this, I drew a first layman’s conclusion: this must be about helping biological women who in an effort to transition to maleness have gone through hormonal or surgical interventions and who now, a baby having come along, find it difficult to breastfeed.

Problems

There’s problems there, including Mr Engelsmann advising mentally unwell women who want to bind their breasts for hours at a time on how they can both do that and breastfeed – but it gets much worse. Engelsman has spoken at conferences for fetishists on the subject of ‘Inducing Lactation for Kinksters’. Using hormones, it appears, some men try to bring about a secretion from the nipple (or, as Mr Engelsman says, ‘to induce lactation’) so as to “assert their own feelings of parenthood, gender euphoria, or just for the unique experience of it.” He cites other reasons “including curiosity, or fun, or sexual gratification.”

They never consider studies as to what family form is most conducive to children growing up in a well-adjusted way”

“Excuse my regressive ignorance here,” said columnist Brenda Power in the Daily Mail, “but isn’t any parent who prioritises their own feelings and desire for ‘euphoria’ over their baby’s needs potentially guilty of child abuse?”

If all this wasn’t bad enough, consider the attitude of the HSE when alerted. The conference was “in line with equality legislation and inclusion strategies”, they said, citing studies showing the growing number of families born in diverse family structures.

We already knew the apparatus of State in this country doesn’t care about what kind of family situation or structures children are born into, as long as the adults get what they want. They don’t care whether a child has a father in his or her life, whether he has one mother or two mothers or anything like that. They never consider studies as to what family form is most conducive to children growing up in a well-adjusted way.

Captured

The HSE has been captured, ideologically. In recent years their booklets advising women about smear tests insisted on referring not to ‘women’ but to ‘persons with cervixes’. Now they are turning a blind eye to the potential abuse of babies where fetishists want to satisfy their urges.

Who is going to re-school the HSE on what justice and concern for children’s welfare requires?”

Any linkage between breastfeeding and sexual gratification should cause fear and concern and lead to prompt action by the responsible people in the HSE. Instead, they’re enabling the wrongdoing. This, in turn, is being facilitated by the Minister for Health who, to my knowledge, has refused to comment so far. Jennifer Carroll McNeill is there to oversee policy and law around public health. She has a duty to speak up when bad things happen in the health service, and frequently does. Her silence now, when something as manifestly bad as this is going on, is odious. It frustrates the holding to account of all those HSE officials who support such dangerous weirdness. With the Government washing its hands, who is going to re-school the HSE on what justice and concern for children’s welfare requires?

Good news

The good news is that the October conference will not go ahead in the Ardilaun for what the organisers say are “health and safety reasons”. No thanks to the HSE. Kudos, however, to people like midwife Sorcha Nic Lochlainn, a Director of The Countess organisation which advocates for the safety of women and girls in the context of some of the threats posed by trans activism. The Countess doesn’t get any funding from the HSE to my knowledge. But they are sharp and focused when it comes to calling out nonsense from the Government and its agencies. “Any man who would associate infant feeding with sexual gratification should pose a red flag,” Nic Lochlainn told the Connacht Tribune. Who could disagree?

In the coming weeks, I will try to play my part by asking the Oireachtas Health Committee to call in the HSE over this. I encourage you to be relentless with your politicians – from the Health Minister down – until they see sense on this.

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The Minister for Children, Norma Foley, chided me recently for relaying, on the floor of the Seanad, a comment by former Fine Gael Minister for Justice, Charlie Flanagan, that Norma had ‘laughed in his face’ when he expressed concern about a perverse, highly sexualised book with trans themes being made available to children in public libraries.

Norma felt that I should know her better than to think or say that she would ever laugh in anybody’s face. I know Norma a long time. She is a decent person who would not deliberately insult anybody. But having checked with Charlie Flanagan, here’s what happened. A couple of years ago, Charlie drew the Minister’s attention to the book and made a point of giving it to her before a Dáil recess. When he met her weeks later and asked for a response, she laughed it off and moved on.

There are two ways to laugh in a person’s face. You can do it in a way that mocks and taunts them. Or you can laugh away an embarrassing or challenging conversation that you don’t want to have. Both are rejection responses. The latter type is what happened here. So when Gript’s Ben Scallon recently asked Norma about the book and she said she hadn’t read it, well that wasn’t quite the full story.

“The best lack all conviction,” Yeats wrote, “and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The trans activists make hay in pushing their agenda, with the support of some politicians who are fully on board with their agenda. Meanwhile other politicians including Ministers, decent people, want to stick close to the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, and keep their place. They don’t want to hear, much less ask, the hard questions. Even if those questions bear directly on children’s welfare. When they laugh off your concerns, it feels like the Government is laughing in your face.

By the way, I was having a cup of tea with my mother and told her about Jacob Engelsman and the proposed lactation-for-men topic in Galway. She told me to drop the subject because it was making her nauseous.

Why can’t my mother be a Minister?