I am a passionate advocate of breastfeeding and breastfed my four children. Nonetheless, I am disturbed at the way that breastfeeding is wielded by breastfeeding activists (lactivists) to criticize other women. New studies confirm that many of the purported benefits of breastfeeding have been grossly overstated. The scientific literature shows that while breastfeeding has real benefits, the benefits are actually quite small.

Lactivism is just one aspect of the growing cult of "total motherhood". The article Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign by Joan Wolf describes how lactivism is a facet of a new moralism that has redefined the role of the mother to promote the personal preferences of a select group of women.

"... [T]otal motherhood obligates mothers to be experts in everything their children might encounter, to become lay pediatricians, psychologists, consumer products – safety inspectors, toxicologists, educators, and more. Mothers are expected not only to protect their children from immediate threats but also to predict and prevent any circumstance that might interfere with putatively normal development. Total motherhood is a moral code in which mothers are exhorted to optimize every dimension of children’s lives, beginning with the womb, and its practice is frequently cast as a trade-off between what mothers might like and what babies and children must have."

The corrosive nature of such moralizing is on display in public health campaigns designed to promote breastfeeding and in the way that lactivists talk about and treat other women.

"... [W]omen’s needs — to work, control their bodies, or sustain an identity independent of their children — become "weaknesses in individual maternal character, to be corrected through educational messages". This kind of reasoning, which implies that either ignorance, cowardice, or selfishness is behind a mother's decision not to do what is best for her baby, rests firmly on assumptions about total motherhood in a risk society..."

Any woman is free to choose the principles of "total motherhood" for herself and her family. The problem occurs when these women and their supporters assert that what is best for themselves and their families is objectively required either for health reasons or emotional reasons. Lactivists need to understand that their way of looking at the world, and the role of mothers in the world, is only one of many possible ways. While it might currently be a popular view, particularly among Western, white, relatively well educated and relatively well off women, that does not privilege it above other possible ways of understanding the role and obligations of mothers. "Total motherhood" and the view of breastfeeding as a proxy for good mothering are cultural fads, no different than the cultural fads that once considered breastfeeding primitive and ignorant. Lactivists have no right to lie to women about the risks and benefits of breastfeeding, and they have no right to present their view of mothering as superior to anyone else's view.

A visitor from outer space might be forgiven for concluding that the most important part of the human body is the foreskin. It is, after all, the only part of the body that has multiple organizations devoted to its preservation in the natural state.

It would probably come as a shock to our visitor to learn that circumcision is just one in a series of issues that allow some parents to feel superior to other parents. In fact, the fetishization of the foreskin is just another example of maintaining that minor, irrelevant decisions are critical to parenting, while major decisions that have an impact on the community at large (such as vaccination) should be left entirely to parental discretion.

The foreskin fetishists are so obsessed with the foreskin that they actually dare to advance the misogynistic claim that male circumcision is analogous to female genital mutilation, in other words, that the foreskin is the analogue of the clitoris. The male analogue of clitoridectomy is is amputation of the penis. Comparing circumcision to clitoridectomy is like comparing ear piercing to having your ears cut off.

Why do anti-circ activists fetishize the foreskin? They do so because it is a convenient way to assert superiority over parents who make different decisions. The anti-circ activists belong to a group of parents who believe that parenting can be reduced to a few decisions (trivial in reality) about birth, circumcision, diapers (cloth or disposable), whether your child sleeps in your bed, and how much and how you carry your baby around. Fortunately, or unfortunately, parenting is far more complicated.

"Teuter is a Jewish surname, right?"

Evaluating people's comments by their (perceived) Jewishness is anti-Semitism, right?

I know it's so much more tempting to veer off into anti-Semitism than to deal with the actual issue. Anti-circ activists fetishize the foreskin because they think that makes them better parents and superior individuals. Instead, it merely makes them people who fetishize the foreskin.

How very inconvenient for the foreskin fetishists that it turns out that circumcision provides substantial health benefits and that the World Health Organization recommends it. Or are they all Jews, too?

"who the F believes that you graduated from Harvard or that you're an OBGYN?"

Anyone who bothers to check knows it's true.

Just like anyone who bothers to check knows that circumcision provides medical benefits. Of course there are many people who'd rather make up stuff, like you just made up about me. Kind of puts your credibility in doubt when you can't even find out the obvious.

I love the fact that people who disagree with me like to pretend that I don't exist. So much easier than actually addressing what I have to say, isn't it? And yet, so pathetic.