Mother's Milk

Just how far have we gone - and how far should we go - to affirm men as mothers? What is the evidence that supports male induced lactation as beneficial to new borns?

On June 29th 2023 there was a brief TV segment from ITV News that excited a lot of interest. Mika Minio-Paluello expressed himself to be a ‘concerned mum’, worried about the rising costs of living and increased water prices. You can read more about this and watch the clip at Glinner’s substack.

There were many exasperated and comical comments about the segment showing Mika’s use of a washing up bowl to transport a few items of clothing to the washing machine and washing dishes under running water (small wonder his water bills were so high) but the over-arching theme of the objections was that Mika was observably male; a nice skirt and dangly earings did not a ‘mother’ make.

‘Mother’ is one of the 23 ‘ultra conserved words’ that have existed for 15,000 years. It is a term for a female parent; it cannot easily nor lightly be cast aside.

I and many others made the point that it was not ‘transphobic’ to deny Mika the ‘right’ to be a mother - the status of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are explicitly exempt from recognition of gender identity; see in section 12 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the fact that a person's gender has become the acquired gender under this Act does not affect the status of the person as the father or mother of a child.

This is clearly illustrated by the McConnell case, where a trans identifying woman was denied the right to change her child’s birth certificate to record her as ‘father’. This is of course because the birth certificate is the child’s document, not the parents. A child has a right to know their biological origins.

However, shortly afterwards Mika posted a lengthy thread on Twitter, defending his right to be called a ‘mother’ and characterising any objections as ‘transphobic abuse’. One of the pictures that jumped out was an updated photo purporting to be of Mika breastfeeding what seems to be a very small baby, on the bus on the way to a chemotherapy session.

There is lot to puzzle about over this picture. How did Mika come into possession of such a young child? Where is the child’s mother? Is she ok with all this? Why is Mika having a photograph of breast feeding taken on a bus? Why is the baby being taken to a hospital while Mika has chemotherapy? Is the baby even feeding?

But the primary question for me is — how far are we willing to go in order to service male affirmation and validation?

I accept that it is possible for men to breastfeed. Whether its possible for a man to produce milk in sufficient quantity and quality to adequately nourish an infant over time, is another question altogether, and there appears to be no evidence to date that this is possible.

Mika claimed in other tweets that he was able to breastfeed by using the ‘standard’ protocol for adoptive mothers. It is not clear what ‘protocol’ is referred to - I have never in 20 years of practice in family law in the UK been referred to such a protocol. I can only assume he means the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, developed in the USA in 2000, for women who had not been pregnant but wanted to breastfeed.

This guide to maximizing breastmilk production came about as a result of Lenore’s own experience with induced lactation. In 1999, she set about trying to find a way to bring in a milk supply for her son who was to be born via gestational surrogacy. Lenore contacted Dr. Newman as soon as she learned that her son was on the way, and together they set upon a journey that enabled Lenore to successfully breastfeed her son, who was born 2 months prematurely, from his second day of life. Lenore was able, with Dr. Newman’s help, to bring in an astonishing 32 oz of her own milk per day without going through a pregnancy.

But as the Hospital Infant Feeding Network notes

There is little evidence related to the success or safety of the protocol, the impact of specific elements/doses or the constituents of the milk produced. Lactation professionals report anecdotally that there is significant variability, with some people able to produce a large amount of milk and most able to produce a partial milk supply. In general domperidone must be continued throughout the period of lactation, which is challenging in the UK due to the MHRA notification that domperidone should only be used for nausea and vomiting, at the lowest effective dose and for the shortest possible time, due to reports of cardiac conduction side effects.

Others have expressed serious concerns about supporting men to breastfeed children - the milk that is produced varies significantly in quantity and nature from mother’s breastmilk. See this critical analysis from 2018 of a published papers which claimed to have established 6 weeks of breastfeeding from a trans identified man - but the authors never observed any breastfeeding nor even met the child or the mother.

The With Women organisation commented in May 2023 that encouraging men to breastfeed should not be encouraged. While men can produce milk, it is inferior in quality and quantity to that produced by a mother - a mother’s milk is unique to her and her baby, tailored for that baby at that age and at that time. The anti-immune properties, fat ratio and volume are responsive to the baby’s needs, even changing according to the sex of the baby.

With Women conclude that not only can a male body not produce the amount of milk needed for a baby, attempting to try is essentially experimentation on a baby.

It’s just not possible for a male body to make the upwards of half a litre of milk every day needed by a week old baby, or 50 mls every two to three hours, let alone the litre plus required by an older one. No case study has ever given the necessary details showing the regular weight gain and healthy development of an infant fed by milk from a male. It’s an experiment – midwives and other health care professionals should not accept experimentation on babies. 

I wonder when we are going to be capable of having conversations about this which are not peppered with abusive allegations of ‘transphobe’ or calling men like Mika ‘freaks’. Because conversations are becoming increasingly urgent. In order to validate adults who want to reject their sexed bodies, we are encouraging women and girls into double mastectomies so they will never breast feed and encouraging men to take a huge cocktail of unexamined substances so that they might - for a week or so. This will I am afraid include transparent recognition that for some men, breastfeeding is part of a sexual fetish.

Stuck in the middle of all this of course is the baby. The child’s welfare is what matters here, not the validation or affirmation of any adult. We have to be able to talk about this. We have to be allowed to object. Absent any clear research that babies are not harmed by male induced lactation, we should at the very least pause in our celebrations.