[LMB] OT: Female exams, etc.

[Azalais Aranxta]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Rachel Ganz wrote:

> But then I'm rather bitter since a friendly anthroposophist
> told me that the only reason people vaccinate their children is
> that they're too lazy to nurse them.

I love how judgemental some people are.  Not.  Lazy?  I'd bet
this was a guy, except for the fact that sadly, the people who
are most judgemental of other women tend to be women.  At least
if he's a guy I can say, oh, well, he doesn't know how hard this
is in our society right now.

The last half-century has been a difficult time for women who
want to have both careers and children.  Going back to the model
where women don't have careers is problematic in the extreme
since not all women are suited for childbearing, not all men are
suited for fatherhood, and it is impossible for women to have
social autonomy if they don't at least have the possibility of
economic autonomy.  If you want to succeed in your career you
must absolutely give the impression that motherhood is not
slowing you down.  If you want to succeed at motherhood you have
to be willing to put your children first.  As long as we force
women to choose one over the other, this is not going to work
very well, but of course, those who don't want to see women
succeed are going to make this choice impossible.

If we want more people to nurse, a couple of things have to
happen.  The first and foremost is that workplaces need to be
more friendly to nursing.  Obviously there are many jobs at which
it is neither safe nor efficient to have a nursing baby on site,
but there needs to be at the very least a safe space that's not
the bathroom for women to express milk.

Not only would you not want to eat in a bathroom, but I work in a
hospital, and have several times encountered the scenario where I
had just used the facilities and *had to go looking for somewhere
else to wash my hands* because there was a breast pump being used
and it was in the only sink in the two-seater loo.  Chew on
that--this happened in a hospital.  The last place you want
people expressing milk in an unclean area and the last place you
want staff to not have easy handwashing available.

We also need nursing in public to become much more socially
acceptable and better solutions for those who don't want to
expose themselves in public.

We also need more education AND LESS EVANGELISM about lactation.

The less evangelism is in allcaps for a reason.  If someone
really, really doesn't want to do something, evangelising them
about it almost never helps, and if someone is good enough to
give you a reason why they're not doing something that's really
not your business anyway, you need to not act as though your
entire purpose for being is to tear down whatever reason they
give you.

Particularly if their reasons involve medication--I didn't care
that my meds hadn't been *proven unsafe*, I knew that no meds was
safer than probably-but-we're-not-sure-if-they're-REALLY-safe
meds that have been in use less than 20 years, and formula didn't
have meds in it, and I'm not stopping meds, and yes the baby, if
she had lived, would already have had meds in her system, but why
add to the load?  Seriously, when I was (unsuccessfully) pregnant
there were several people I nearly punched because they would not
fereffssake shut up about this.  Fortunately most of it was
online so I simply made use of a killfile.  I'll still killfile
people like that, if they're obnoxious enough to someone else.

~malfoy :)

****************************************************************
Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy)
ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness

"I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it
think we all bow down." --Christopher Fry