Is having children “liberal” or “conservative”? Obviously, that question is way too simplistic for the complicated age in which we live, so let’s be more specific.

OK, is it “conservative” for a husband and wife to have, oh, four or more children? If you have followed birth-rate trends in American culture in recent decades, you would have to say this choice is “conservative” and almost certainly “faith-based.”

This brings us to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Is it “liberal” or “conservative” for a mother to breastfeed a newborn? Actually, that choice is totally mainstream. Ah, but is it “liberal” or “conservative” for a biological male who to one degree or another has transitioned to “female” identity to, with medical assistance, “chestfeed” a newborn obtained via surrogacy or adoption? Is that choice “normal” or “natural”?

Apparently, some leaders with the La Lache League have decided that this influential national and global network — which promoted the return of breastfeeding for millions of mothers in the 1950s — have decided that it’s time to edit the word “motherhood” out of that equation.

Here is a chunk of the relevant feature by Bethany Mandel at The Free Press: “La Leche League Erases Mothers.”

Founded in Chicago in 1956, now with 1,020 expert volunteers hosting monthly meetings across the U.S., La Leche League takes the lead in teaching mothers how to breastfeed in America. When it began its work, just 20 percent of mothers in the U.S. breastfed; now that figure is 75 percent. …

La Leche League’s meetings are now also open to biological men. All attendees have to do is say they’re transgender or nonbinary, and they can come and watch women baring their breasts while obtaining breastfeeding support.

The La Leche League website is both clear, and not so clear, about what is going on. Mandel noted:

… One wonders precisely who these meetings are now open to: Is it biological men who want to induce chemical lactation in themselves, or is it biological women who now consider themselves to be men? … Recently, I noticed the League’s website also states that its mission is to help parents “breastfeed, chestfeed, and human milk feed their babies.” The information section asks, “Do you have questions about breastfeeding, chestfeeding, pumping, and more?” Donations, the website says, will help sustain “breastfeeding, chestfeeding, and human milk feeding.”

Meanwhile, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, a guidebook by La Leche League that’s been around since the 1950s, is being rereleased in October under a new title: The Art of Breastfeeding — erasing the word woman entirely.

When contacted, La Leche League declined to explain these changes.

Is there a “religion ghost” in this story, one that would be obvious when pursued by journalists at the local, national and global levels?

The roots of the organization, including the name, are clear. Dig into a New York Times report from 2008 about the founders of the organization — a circle of seven Catholic mothers with, between them, 55 children.

They insisted that breast-feeding was better than the bottle — more natural, more nutritional, more sustaining of deep mother-baby attachment — long before the feminist health movement or the medical establishment did so. Their mother-to-mother counseling strategy grew out of the Christian Family Movement, a progressive ecumenical group in which “like ministered to like” on social justice. …

The seven founding mothers named their group after a shrine to a nursing Spanish Madonna (la leche means “the milk”). As Froehlich put it, “You didn’t mention ‘breast’ in print unless you were talking about Jean Harlow.”

Once again, this movement was countercultural when it began. Now breastfeeding is normal in mainstream American culture.

But what happens now? Will pro-Catechism Catholics need to start their own post-La Leche League network, reclaiming the holy Madonna of the La Leche Shrine all over again? What would Southern Baptists or nondenominational evangelicals call a breastfeeding network, if they decided to found one? You get the idea.

Complicated times, complicated times. But this is certainly a news story that captures these complicated times.

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