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CV NEWS FEED // The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) endorsed induced lactation in “transgender women” (men who claim to be women), claiming that such men can “chestfeed” infants with the aid of drugs and ignoring health risks to the men and to babies.
The CDC website has several articles devoted to so-called “chestfeeding” or “bodyfeeding,” and assures readers that “an individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed.” While this is sometimes true of women who have been able to achieve lactation through natural stimulation, it does not apply to biological men attempting to nurse babies.
In the articles, the federal agency recommends using “gender-inclusive language” such as “breastfeeding parent” or “lactating person,” but ironically uses the words “women” and “mothers” in every other normal article about breastfeeding. A section of the webpage is also devoted to instructions for people suffering from gender dysphoria who wish to breastfeed, suggesting options like medications and artificial hormones.
According to the Daily Mail, men can produce a substance similar to breastmilk by taking hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, and prolactin to imitate the natural process of lactation in women. However, medications with these sex hormones are thought to cause cardiac issues and can pass into the “breastmilk.”
In 2004, the FDA specifically warned against using an anti-nausea drug called domperidone that boosted prolactin for induced lactation in women, stating that the drug poses health risks to nursing infants and causes irregular heartbeats in babies. Domperidone is now used by men with gender dysphoria to induce lactation.
The first scientifically recorded case of induced lactation in a man was in 2018. A man suffering from gender dysphoria named Mika Minio-Paluello recently tweeted an image of himself “breastfeeding” his baby and set off an internet firestorm, with numerous people, including swimmer Riley Gaines, calling male breastfeeding “child abuse” and accusing Paluello of using his baby as a “prop” to confirm his “gender” identity.
Many are concerned about the drugs used by Paluello to produce lactation. If domperidone causes problems for women and babies, critics argue, then men cannot take the drug to cause lactation either.
Dr. Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, is warning that many people no longer believe domperidone-induced lactation is harmful. “A lot of people are pushing for off-label use of a drug,” Orient told the Daily Mail. “It’s become so politicized that you can do all kinds of things for a politically approved purpose.”
“The CDC has a responsibility to talk about the health risks, but they have been derelict in doing that,” she said.
Dr. Orient also pointed out that there has been no research on the long-term effects of medically-inducing lactation in a male. Dr. Stuart Fischer, an internal medicine physician in New York, agreed with her.
“If it’s been tested a handful of times, how would we know the long-range effect?” Fischer said:
The short-term is one thing, but the long-term in terms of physical and mental illness… who knows? It’s an emerging field, to put it mildly. This is the kind of thing where politics and science are uncomfortably put together.
