This week has been quite awful and I guess it has been quite awful for most US women. I believe that Judge Kavanaugh and the Republicans have really misjudged how their performance theater came across to most women. I can't look at all those Republican men without feeling upset, pissed off, and angry. And I don't care what the FBI turns up because this whole circus performance by the Republican Party reflects on how white entitled males view women. So we basically know what will happen, if Judge Kavanaugh gets on the Supreme Court. Yes, quite simply I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
You may wonder what this has to do with human milk or patents. Who controls the making of our laws and our government? Legislators, billionaires, corporations and their lobbyists; all mostly males. The perpetuation of rape culture particularly in academic institutions of higher learning puts women in "their place." The use of rape is a common war tactic used to subdue other nations and in our own country to control women. It's not about sex, its about power and control. Domination. Fuel the need to dominate with alcohol or drugs, and what we get is a society of violent acts and violence towards people, particularly women and children.
Societies prone to violence treat their young with emotional and physical violence. The Spartans of Greece, were considered great warriors. They were brought up strictly: infant cries ignored, boys at a young age taken away from parents to be trained in the military, hazing and fighting encouraged in children. https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-it-wasnt-easy-being-spartan
In the US, the violence of our actions globally are also reflected in how women and children are treated in our own society. Birthing is manipulated and violent with women enduring either a very drugged birth, surgery, or a very painful birth based on the convenience of a medical staff. Sleep training, letting babies cry it out until they vomit, separation of mothers and babies/children as normal: are all ways in which nurture/nature is disdained. Women no longer believe that their bodies work and postpartum depression has become the norm. Birth/breastfeeding can not be achieved without technological interventions and drugs. Natural birthing or exclusive breastfeeding is dangled in front of women as impossible, impractical, and unsafe. Meanwhile maternal and infant mortality increases as more women are persuaded that male-dominated medicine and corporate infant feeding is the only answer to risky female biology. Female instincts are mocked and driven underground. Women are encouraged to return to employment while having their babies and children. Mocked for being depressed because of forced early separation. Mocked for being tired or sick. Told to remember that indigenous women had their babies in the fields as they worked and went right back to work. So women feel guilty for not having babies easily in hospitals and guilty for being so damn tired. And guilty for not breastfeeding. How easy to manipulate women into one huge guilt trip regarding their own biology. Women have a biology that many men do not understand or even care to know. It is a biology not necessarily connected to them and their sexuality. War-like societies do not want a society that nurtures the next generation. They need a society devoid of connections to humanity, a society that turns a blind eye to its violence against women and children.
Women can grow and feed a human, sustaining life without dependency on corporations. Men of science are busy in their labs trying to imitate that ability in order to make a profit. Meanwhile the propaganda machines continue to spew out messages that make women feel less capable physically and mentally. It's a societal rape on the nature of women. Modern science no longer needs women. They can make a baby in a petri dish, grow it in a plastic sack, birth it, and feed it an imitation human milk. So women can be more like men and men can have babies and feed them, too. The problem with presumption of control of nature/biology is that life is far more complex than current knowledge. Do we understand the biological and societal repercussions? How much of this science is based on discrimination and contempt of women?
"Indigenous knowledge systems are by and large ecological while the dominant model of scientific knowledge, characterized by reductionism and fragmentation, is not equipped to take the complexity of interrelationships in nature fully into account." --Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge
I consider breastfeeding a system of primal, instinctual knowledge that runs counter to the current medical, legal, corporate, and scientific value system. Originally breastfeeding was shared from mother to mother, passed from one generation to the next. It was survival. It was about keeping the next generation fed. And it was about quickly responding to infant cues for comfort, food, and warmth with the breast. The cries of infants were never ignored. Babies slept with their mothers because an infant alone in those early days would not survive. Modern medicine ignores the instinct of mothers to be near their infants, to sleep with them, to hold them close, to breastfeed them. That instinct is always close to the surface of a mother's emotions in the early days postpartum. And sadly that instinct is discouraged, replaced with medical-technical advice that is contradictory and confusing. Mothers suffer, when breastfeeding fails because it is a far bigger loss than is recognized by society. The primitive part of the brain recognizes the loss but society refuses to recognize it. Women are told breastfeeding doesn't matter. We have infant formula, "closer to breast milk than ever before."
The domination of women impacts our lives as girls, young women, in pregnancy, childbearing, and even into our "elder" age. Violence towards women is part of that domination and control. Rape is one part of that domination. Similar violence permeates birth and breastfeeding.
I feel tangled up in a variety of emotions. Hopeful because of women like Christine Blasey Ford who are willing to speak their truth to power. Disgusted by the contempt republicans revealed in the Congressional hearing, towards women. I have seen that same contempt towards women by males in the medical, legal and business communities. Contempt is the other side of violence. Contempt blinds people from seeing the person in front of them as human, as worthy of time and consideration. It blinds people from seeing the physical and emotional pain of another human being.
Likewise, the patenting of human milk components shows a contempt, a violence, towards women and their biology. Human milk components are not inventions or the intellectual property of researchers and corporations. Human milk components are part of a complex nurturing system that cannot be owned. We do violence to women and future generations, when we ignore the violence behind a system that patents life, that claims ownership in the biology of women. The culture of contempt of women creates a blindness to rape and a blindness to the usurious nature of patenting human milk components.
Copyright 2018 Valerie W. McClain
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