The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is offering guidance for men identifying as transgender on how to breastfeed and insisting on using the “inclusive” term “chestfeeding.” The CDC released advice this week for men taking hormones to grow breasts, explaining, “Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).” The CDC also gave some examples of alternative terminology for breastfeeding to cater to those identifying as transgender, “such as nursing, chestfeeding, or bodyfeeding.”
The CDC further noted that those identifying as transgender “may need help with … maximizing milk production, supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk or formula, medication to induce lactation or avoiding medications that inhibit lactation, suppressing lactation (for those choosing not to breastfeed or chestfeed)…”
The guidance is drawing criticism from doctors who note that the hormone drugs taken by men wanting to “chestfeed” may be dangerous for the baby being fed. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned that at least one of the hormone drugs frequently used “can pass into breast milk in small amounts and can sometimes give babies an irregular heartbeat as a result.” Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told the Daily Mail that “we have no idea what the long-term effects on the child will be. … The CDC has a responsibility to talk about the health risks, but they have been derelict in doing that.”
On Thursday’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, also spoke of the health risks posed. “We are putting a brand new baby, a child who has no defenses at all, who can’t speak for himself, we’re putting that child’s life at risk. We’re putting that child at risk of having heart palpitations and various difficulties so that we can encourage this woke culture.”
Szoch went on to address the danger “chestfeeding” poses to natural order and the affront that it is to motherhood:
“One of the things about being a mom is that [it] is centered on others. The womb is actually the only place in the body, the woman’s uterus is the only organ that is actually created to house another. And so motherhood itself is other-focused, and chest feeding is self-centered, self-focused. It’s a perversion of a beautiful act that is intended to nourish a child. … It is 100% focused on the man who is masquerading as a woman and who has this perverted desire to feed a child or to pretend to feed a child.”
This latest CDC guidance follows a growing trend under the Biden administration, as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which manages the CDC, has increased focus on LGBT issues. Last month, HHS hosted a Pride Summit to celebrate all things homosexual and transgender, and assistant HHS secretary Rachel Levine, a man originally named Richard who identifies as transgender, asserted that Pride Month isn’t enough, saying, “Let’s declare it a summer of Pride.”
Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Family Studies, explained to The Washington Stand that the field of gender transition procedures “has the least evidence to recommend it,” yet HHS continues to promote it and cast doubt on any dissent, no matter how empirical. With that precedent, and with the Biden administration’s vociferous abortion advocacy, it’s unlikely the CDC will take into account potential health risks to infants when promoting “chestfeeding.”
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
