VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN & CHILDREN

“Each man’s [woman’s and child’s] death diminishes me,

 For I am involved in mankind.

 Therefore, send not to know

 For whom the bell tolls,

 It tolls for thee.”   John Donne, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

Today, May 7^th, is the 108th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, torpedoed by a German U-boat in waters off the coast of Ireland (Queensland, now named Cobh of County Cork). One thousand, one hundred and ninety-five passengers and crew died that day.  Among those that died was my great-grandfather, his adult son and grandson.  His daughter (one of 763 survivors) survived. My Aunt Chris was only 16 years old at that time. She identified her Dad’s body, but her brother’s and nephew’s bodies were not found.  My great-grandfather was buried in a mass grave in Queensland.

It was always rumored that the Lusitania carried illegal munitions from the US to Great Britain for the WWI fight against Germany.  In the 1980’s divers discovered that indeed there was munitions on board the Lusitania.  My Aunt Chris who was in her cabin, when the torpedo hit, said the hit seemed mild, a thud.  But shortly after the torpedo hit, there was a huge explosion. The story of my Aunt’s survival was told and retold, when I was a child.  The anger and sadness passes from one generation to the next generation.  

War brings death and destruction to so many innocent people.  As the war rages on in the Ukraine, it seems that humanity refuses to figure out how to live in peace.  I live in a country that has always been on war-time footing.  Billions of dollars goes to direct wars or proxy wars, and spending on making peaceful communities thrive is not financially supported.  We are the Greek Spartans, our culture lives to fight.  Guns first, negotiate second or never.  It is a difficult society to live in, if you are a woman or child or baby.  Let the babies cry it out; toughen them up for the future of more wars, of a society without compassion or concern. Put the children in daycare, work for next to nothing, and have no time left for relationships. Schools and malls become the slaughterhouse of enraged young white males.  Violence like a plague of genetically engineered, mutant bacteria grows exponentially unleashing more violence.

Government leaders view women and children as an albatross around their necks.  Neither are allowed bodily autonomy, used and thrown out by the privileged.  How did Jeffrey Epstein’s game of sexually trafficking under-aged children survive for so long?  How many well-known wealthy people have been ensnared by his blackmail and financial games?  We live in a sick society.

I remember as a child, my parents harboring a next-door neighbor and her 6 kids from her abusive husband.  I was probably 4 or 5 at the time, so I didn’t really understand what was going on. Later I lived in a neighborhood in which the man across the street battered his wife regularly.  Every neighbor called the police at one time or another, it didn’t do any good. They had 3 kids. When she finally left him, she was executed by him in front of her 3 kids.  My husband at the time called the police, when another neighbor called for help.  She was being strangled by her boyfriend, when the police broke down the door. 

Does this behavior impact breastfeeding?  Yes, research has shown that women who are abused by their partners (usually male partners) are more likely to not breastfeed.  When I was employed by the WIC Program, we had electric breast pumps that we loaned out to moms who had premature babies.  I remember trying to get a hold of one of the moms who had one of our pumps.  She was very apologetic and told me her boyfriend had damaged the pump.  She did return it but the pump was totally unusable.  I talked about this situation with a Healthy Start nurse who told me that a study she had read that a pregnant mom who experienced domestic abuse had double the risk of preterm labor.  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160309083114.htm

https://www.domesticshelters.org/articles/identifying-abuse/what-is-physical-abuse

Over the many decades of my life, I think that at this point in time most people would spurn violence against people.  Male violence against women and children is an unfair match.  Most males are bigger and stronger than women and children.  Control is the issue. But control or power over others means very little because respect is the issue.  Control and power over someone else, dissolves respect.  Freedom is what is desired, and it only grows with respect not violence. “For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

©2023 Valerie W. McClain

THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS

“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit.  Power is in your soul.  It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you.  Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.”  --Winona LaDuke

 

Rays of sunshine filtered through the stained glass window, the Biblical scene on that window shimmered and came alive.  I sat quietly in the pew mesmerized by the play of the light and shadow on the carpeted floor of the Church. I should have been praying, but instead I was watching the dance of light and shadow across the floor.  I spent a lot of my Sundays as a child and teenager in Church entertaining my boredom by daydreaming.  But in 1968 we had a new, young priest and his sermons were not boring.  He took the stories of ancient people in the Bible and made them relevant to current events.  For several Sundays, he talked about the war in Vietnam, and related it to the teachings of Jesus:  “love thy neighbor as thyself,” “thou shall not kill.”  It made sense to me.  It seemed like simple commandments to a naïve teenager, but the commandments of love thy neighbor and do not kill are not so simple for adults.  

One Sunday the priest began again to preach on Vietnam and the war. Suddenly, men quietly started walking out of the Church.  The Church slowly emptied out. My Dad was one of the few men who did not leave.  So I became very curious about why most of the men left the Church. Later that day I asked my Dad why the men walked out of Church in the middle of the sermon, my Dad said all the men worked for GE.  Well that didn’t make sense to me. What did GE have to do with it?  My Dad explained that GE had major contracts with the federal government for the war in Vietnam. 

 A few weeks later the priest was removed from his position in the Church. A new priest was chosen, and once again I found myself staring at the same stained glass window only this time as I watched the light and shadows dance across the carpet I began to recall one of my favorite songs.

“I’m sitting on the dock of the bay Watching the tide roll away, ooh I’m just sitting on the dock of the bay Wastin’ time”  --Otis Redding, Dock of the Bay

My reverie ended abruptly with the sounds of the Church pipe organ playing loud enough to wake the dead.  It certainly ended my wasting time!

About a month later I asked my Dad why the Church had sided with the men from GE, and dismissed the priest. I can’t remember exactly what my Dad said.  I believe he said something like, “If half the church walked out for good, the Church loses the ability to pay its bills, to keep its doors open.”  I found it baffling that the Church chose its economic survival over its values.  The men who walked out of the Church that day also chose their economic survival. Their solidarity in protecting their jobs had resulted in the outcome they desired.  Of course many decades later I understand the economic underpinnings of that decision, although I believe that the Church made an ethically wrong decision.

Ethical or moral decisions are not easy in real life, even for churches.  What I learned from being a witness to this situation is that economics is often the driving force in personal decision-making. The impact for me was a loss of trust in the Church.   

Nowadays I look at research papers and wonder where are the researchers employed, and what other funding do they receive? Does their employment or funding influence their choices of what to study, their methods of research, and impact their conclusions? I remember the Church I use to belong to, and understand the real impact of ethical challenges and how trust can be lost. 

Does funding influence research?

What does the Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series show us in regard to these issues?  The funding and employment of researchers can often give you insight into the underlying assumptions of researchers. We know that medical and scientific journals require researchers to declare their conflict of interest. 

What is a conflict of interest in research (COI)?

“A basic working definition of COI is a situation in which a secondary interest, such as financial or other personal condition has the potential to unduly influence the primary interest of objectivity in research conduct.”  P Knerr and RP D’Amelia, Introduction to the Ethics of Scientific Conflict of Interest (COI), 2020.

Knerr and D’Amelia also state that COI is not considered misconduct because “misconduct is limited to fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.”  They state that “Trust is an essential ethical value of scientific inquiry.” And they state, “Fundamental to this trust is objectivity in the execution, interpretation and dissemination of research.”

How were the researchers of the Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series funded?

It appears from the Lancet papers that the Gates Foundation funded a number of researchers, or their places of employment such as: universities, nonprofit organizations, or governmental bodies such as WHO and UNICEF. Two researchers were social marketers, one from a company and one from a university. Some people call social marketing propaganda.  I think that is pretty accurate.  I don’t care much for being told what to think. One researcher was employed by the Gates Foundation, and another was retired from the Gates Foundation

The Lancet is owned by Elsevier which has an agreement with the Gates Foundation regarding open access policy.

“…requires authors to ensure research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and are supported in whole or in part by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funding, are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CCBY) or an equivalent license, and are deposited immediately in PubMed Central (PMC), or in another openly accessible repository.”

I was surprised when I first started to read the 2023 Breastfeeding Series that I had free access to all of the papers.  I have tried to read other papers in the Lancet and encountered the inevitable pay wall.  The Gates Foundation pays most of the fees, and we all get to read their research for free.  While this appears wonderful, it is also troubling.  The Gates Foundation’s funding of so many researchers, universities, organizations, and governmental body’s means that we are reading freely what the Gates Foundation believes is important. Researchers are in all likelihood picked by the Foundation, because their research aligns with the Foundation’s views.  Will we be able to read alternative views freely? No, because research not funded by Gates is behind a pay wall.  Gates has gained a monopoly on our minds by providing an open door policy to his research, when other research is shuttered by paywalls. 

The Cochrane Studies received funding from the Gates Foundation of $1.15 million for 2016-2017. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2016/09/opp1158795

The Cochrane website states that “they do not accept commercial or conflicted funding.”  They are supposedly the source for “trusted evidence.”  Is the Gates Foundation funding “conflicted?”

The British Global Justice Now organization in a report from 2016 concluded that the Gates Foundation’s:

“…giving is far from a neutral charitable strategy, but instead an ideological commitment to ‘promote neoliberal* economic policies and corporate globalization.’”

* “A policy model that encompasses both politics and economics and seeks to transfer the control of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector.” Definition of neoliberalism by Investopedia

Vandana Shiva has stated,

“Gates has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally.”

To be continued on 3/20/23 at https://valeriewmcclain.substack.com  “Breastfeeding or Bust:  Infant feeding in an Age of Half-Truths & Outright Lies” Subscriptions are free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BREASTFEEDING OR BREASTMILKFEEDING?

“By the time my youngest had moved onto solid foods, I had spent hours on hours staring at my breast pump, imagining all the ways I could improve the design…” -Melinda Gates quoted in an article https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/03/melinda-gates-its-time-to-talk-about-breastfeeding-at-work.html

The title of the article in which Melinda Gates is quoted is, “Melinda Gates: It’s time to get real about breastfeeding at work.” I am vaguely amused by the title because I don’t believe that getting “real” about breastfeeding is about pumping. Yet so many people, including breastfeeding advocates, use the words, breastfeeding and breastmilkfeeding interchangeably. Even the Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series implies by some of their comments that breastfeeding and breastmilkfeeding create the same health benefits to moms and babies. I’d like to see the research papers on that! I haven’t seen any studies that do such a comparison.

The title should have been about getting real about breastmilkfeeding at work. How come one of the wealthiest women on earth must use a breast pump to work? She is not working on an assembly line, in a factory where stoppage of the line would not be acceptable (other than official breaks). Was breastfeeding unacceptable at the Gates Foundation? One would assume she could have an office for privacy and a nanny to care for the baby, if she was uncomfortable about breastfeeding publicly.

The article about Melinda Gates goes onto state:

“In fact Gates says she toyed with [the] idea of patenting her own design. ‘I like to think that in an alternate life, I’m a breast pump tycoon.’”

Was she joking? Perhaps she is thinking of the Gates Foundation’s global agenda of a technological solution to any problem? In this case the problem is employment and breastfeeding. What is acceptable to the US corporate world is getting rooms to pump not keeping mothers and babies together. Do people understand about the cost of infant care? In the US infant care costs way more than child care. And it should cost more. Mothers are irreplaceable. Babies miss their mothers, and strangers are not who they need. Babies cry for many reasons. One unrecognized reason is the need for the presence of their mother. Babies get overfeed in care-giving situations, because the crying is misunderstood for the need to eat, and not the need for physical comfort of the mother’s presence.

I suppose I am fascinated by the Lancet 2023 Breastfeeding Series and its views on crying. Their views made me want to cry. I suppose everyone thinks that crying babies are the norm. Yet there are cultures in which babies don’t cry very much at all. The babies are held or carried most of the time. There are babies that live in communities in which babies’ feet don’t touch the ground until the babies start to walk. Babies are a part of the community, not isolated away from the community. And yes those babies are breastfed.

Some years ago I met a young woman from Liberia, and we were talking about her life and my life. She talked about walking to school and how a Black Mamba snake (one of the most poisonous snakes in her country) appeared in her path. Luckily, she didn’t move, having been taught to stay still. Finally the snake moved away into the brush. She taught me how to cook plaintain, and showed me how to wrap material around my waist to make a skirt (fanti). I talked to her about my desire to become an IBCLC, and she didn’t understand what I was talking about. I tried to explain and said I wanted to teach breastfeeding. She started laughing so hard, and I asked her why she was laughing. She told me that all mothers in Liberia know how to breastfeed, they don’t need teachers. She thought the idea of teaching breastfeeding was crazy, and I felt somewhat offended by her laughter. She was such a delightful person, and her laugh contagious that I laughed just a little bit. It’s only years after teaching US moms to breastfeed, that I understand more fully what she was teaching me. Knowledge of breastfeeding in US culture is buried in technological babel, and in products like pumps, bottles, and pacifiers.

“Breastfeeding is time-consuming for women, which takes away from time that could be spent on income-earning activities.” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01933-X/fulltext

The above quote is from The Lancet Series 2023, Breastfeeding 3-”The political economy of infant and young child feeding: confronting corporate power, overcoming structural barriers, and accelerating progress.” Guess what else is time consuming besides breastfeeding? Yes, breastmilkfeeding and/or infant formula feeding. Heaven forbid mothers breastfeed rather than spending time on income-earning activities. Instead, maybe the request for funds from foundations like Gates should be on giving mothers an income, rather than spending money on programs that end up being beneficial to employers who gain cheap labor. Meanwhile mothers and babies gain what? A pumping room with fancy equipment. Is the solution to global poverty the exportation of pump technology, and mother-baby separation?

Valerie W. McClain

BREASTFEEDING OR BUST: iINFANT FEEDING IN AN AGE OF HALF-TRUTHS & OUTRIGHT LIES

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https://valeriewmcclain.substack.com/p/the-lancet-2023-breastfeeding-series