I presume I don’t have to explain all of the ethics alarms pinged by this amazing tale from academia….
An event this week at Arizona State University, “Jenny Irish’s HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” held both in person and via Zoom, featured Irish, an English professor at ASU, and Professor Angela Lober, director of the Academy of Lactation Programs [ Wait, WHAT???] at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation.
Professor Lober began the one-hour moderated discussion by stating that she “got into this space because the United States hates women and everything the female body does.” Okaaaay—that’s certainly not “misinformation”…or inflammatory. Lober went on to say a “lack of financial incentives in breastfeeding and maternal-child health care” was proof of this hostility and showed that economic interests often override health concerns.
For her part, Irish said the fate of abortion laws has her worried about the possibility of “forced breeding camps” and “cannibalism” driven by a lack of resources. “So much of our reality points toward those futures,” Irish said.
I presume “our reality” is like someone talking about their “truth.”
“A couple years ago I never thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. How could we possibly do that?” Lober said. I guess she’s not a lawyer. Anyone who read the decision since it was written and understands the Constitution as well as principles of jurisprudence knew that it was a sitting duck to be overturned because Roe was bad law. As her solution to the assault on “reproductive rights,” aka the ability to kill unborn human beings at will, Lober suggested “dismantle capitalism” and “elect a female president.”
Funny, I never suspected that being an expert on ‘lactation programs” extended to expertise on history and economics…
Irish added that country should consider how “forcing women into motherhood” affects the broader community. Of course, no woman has to be a mother who doesn’t want to be, but this was clearly not a presentation that was concerned with details. Asked by another participant about the global decline in birth rates Lober said it wasn’t a problem because “we are overpopulated.”
If you say so, professor.
Karina Fitzgerald, the event coordinator, described the event as an effort “to encourage students that are following creative pursuits or other types of worldbuilding to simply explore other elements that they haven’t thought of before in their writing, or other ways to challenge themselves in creative processes.”
Ramalama ding dong.
ASU Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, which presents events that aim to design “a future keyed to human flourishing,” according to its website, co-hosted this mess.
Questions:
- Who are these people?
- How did they get in a position to mold impressionable minds?
- Do parents know they are paying to have their kids taught by lunatics capable of declaring this kind of garbage?
- Is “unhinged hysteria” listed as subject in the ASU course book?
- Wouldn’t a minimum of critical thinking lead anyone, never mind a professor, to discard “cannibalism” as a likely consequence of limiting abortions?
- Has there ever been a period in this country’s history where irresponsible, manipulative fearmongering was more widespread and pernicious? Has there ever been a period since the Dark Ages when unhinged, irresponsible fearmongering was more widespread and pernicious?
Ethics Alarms 
Wait… Forced breeding camps and cannibalism are both solutions to limited resources?
I think someone just watched Soylent Green followed by The Matrix.
It’s time for a remake of the 60s educational film, Introducing the Mentally Retarded.
https://youtu.be/poxEYM0RMto?si=0QG7JnxWIJyyU8xz
Usually the mentally retarded are divided into classifications: the educable, the trainable, and the custodial.
Ramalama ding dong.
I hate to be pedantic, but you misspelled Kamalamadingdong.
OB Jr. graduated from ASU in 1998 with a BA in History. He ran across a good history professor and focused on The Civil War. Obviously, things have gone severely downhill in Tempe in the last nearly thirty years.
I’ve been thinking of late about the effect second wave feminism has had upon women since it made its way into the academy in the early 1970s. That, plus on demand abortion and the pill. I’ve just about concluded they’ve resulted in women ever being involved with men and having children becoming absolutely optional. I suspect it’s a major trend.
Not to get too wacky/illuminati here, but I have a long-held sneaking suspicion that it’s all related to the “my pets are my kids” and “I’m a pet parent” thing going around.
I’m not sure whether it’s on purpose (insert the Frankfurt School boogeyman here), but there does seem to be a strange movement in millennials and Gen Z away from kids and towards pets AS REPLACEMENTS for children.
It’s sad, weird, and spells serious problems for society once the global replacement rate drops below 1 or so.
It’s not wacky. At least two of the TV ads have women saying “this is my baby.”
I think it gets wacky when considering whether the movement is a coordinated and calculated effort to upend Western civilization or whether it’s a natural movement akin to the easily visible correlation of increased education/resources and decreased birth rates.
“lack of financial incentives in breastfeeding and maternal-child health care”
What? There is a major financial incentive in breastfeeding. I never considered not breastfeeding, but glancing at the price of formula underscored the financial benefits.
I also realized it was cheaper to buy a can salt free carrots and purée them, divide, and freeze them in ice cube trays. I wasn’t crunchy-granola mom, just able to do cost comparison.
Exactly what I was thinking, Paula. I thought breast-feeding was by nature economical. Do these peoplelisten to what comes out of their mouths?
Do the pro choice feminists consider that the combined number of aborted fetuses in one year exceed the number of those killed in the current war between Israel and Hamas. The latter is termed a genocide by the very activists promoting reproductive freedom.
I guess the thought is that’s different. These are brown people they can patronize and use as pawns. Unborn children have no such value.
Even if you eliminate the known number of mifepristone induced pregnancy terminations you still had over ten times the number of total killed in the Gaza conflict and about 40 times the number of civilians killed. In 2023 well over 1 million pregnancies were terminated of the number about 63% were drug induced. By the end of August slightly more than 40,000 persons had been killed since the attack on Israel on October 7,2023. Of the 40,000 nearly 2,000 were Israeli civilians.
What they term reproductive freedom is far more like genocide than what they claim is genocide.
I am at a point in which I will encourage these women with such outlandish ideas to reduce their numbers through aborting their own fetuses so they do not inculcate their ideas on another generation.
I went to college just before the Cold War ended. Believe me, there was equally as much hysteria being thrown around then, with people convinced that unless the West disarmed itself yesterday, the world was a few minutes away from blowing itself up. Well, the world is still here, and the people who made profit from telling us we were in grave danger had to look for other causes to keep that money flowing. A lot of them turned to environmental alarmism, claiming we’d be out of oil by 2020, which doesn’t seem to be the case. A lot of others turned to pushing gay rights. And these are the ones that turn to feminism and abortion on demand. Hysteria is a profitable business just like anger.
Question #7 (which, I think, explains most of the others):
What would happen if we took the homeless lady behind the bus station who harangues passers-by about the Illuminati, and gave her tenure?
During the pandemic, there were two billboards near my parking lot: one said: “Breastfeeding, It’s Worth It!” the other, “Planned Parenthood We’re Here For You!”
Same block, different message.
I’m not sure of the whole situation, but I think think there was a movement in 40s through 80s or so to discourage breastfeeding. I can’t imagine why, but a lot of natural behavior was pathologized in this era. C-sections, for instance, were heavily promoted for a while for being “safer”, but many women (some whom I know) feel severe grief for not giving birth the natural way. (There are of course complications that make C-sections necessary, but this lament is over purportively elective surgeries, without known complications).
I’d suspect discouragement around breastfeeding had to do with women being encouraged to work outside the home, but not allowed to bring the baby to feed it, nor being given a private space to “pump” for later. Men, and especially other women, might give a woman dirty looks for trying to do so. It might also have to do with the “pill”, and women being encouraged to restart taking it after birth. The hormones may simply block milk production. This in turn created an infant formula industry, an associated advertising. The advertising would of course have the effect of shaming families further for not giving their babies the most nutritional option. Shame seems to be the greatest advertising strategy.
Generationally, grandmother’s who did not breastfeed may not encourage their daughters to breastfeed, or be unable to help when the mother and child have difficulty. I am by far no expert on this topic, but I heard it can be difficult to encourage an infant to latch, which can cause panic if the family can’t seem to feed the baby. Without intergenerational support, families either turn to lactation experts, or go to the formula aisle.
The effect above is a schizophrenic culture when it comes to breastfeeding. Some families feel extreme shame over feeding or not feeding. Some are completely unaware of the issue. Whether breastfeeding is economical is really a function of whether mothers can afford to take time off immediately after birth, and have the proper accommodations if they return to work. They are noe legally entitled to such accommodations, although the culture at a particular workplace may or may not be.
I have a grudge against the ‘lactation community’. They are the reason my wife DIDN’T breastfeed. She, like her mother, didn’t produce milk right away. Her mother said it took over 2 weeks after birth before she started producing milk. This is not unusual, you can read accounts of it throughout history and was one of the reasons ‘wet nurses’ existed. In the hospital, the ‘lactation specialist’ would come in and guilt trip us every time we gave our son a bottle. Well, we had to give him a bottle because she wasn’t producing any milk. The ‘lactation specialist’ would tell us that each bottle made it less likely that our son would be able to breastfeed. She was in the hospital for 3 days. The ‘lactation specialist’ would call daily to guilt-trip us about bottle feeding. My wife was trying to pump, but nothing was coming out. I kept telling her it would probably take 2+ weeks, like with her mom, but the ‘lactation specialist’ had told her that if she bottle fed for 2 weeks, there was no point in trying to breast feed. I am convinced that this helped my wife spiral into postpartum depression.
The ‘lactation community’ with their ‘lactation specialists’ is a cult. They have a set doctrine and anything that deviates from it is heresy and is stamped out or cast out. My mother-in-law told me that they did the same thing to her. Her first child didn’t get any nourishment for 2 days because of the bullying of the ‘lactation specialist’ not to feed from a bottle. Luckily, the obstetrician came in on the second day and told her to get the kid a bottle and stop listening to the nutjobs in the lactation department.
As for who are these people and how did they get into this position, that is pretty easy. In the 1970’s, the Marxists were definitely out in the open in academia. They introduced a lot of new subject to academia. These subjects were unlike any previous academic subjects. Previously, academic subjects were focused on discovery and specifically, discovery of truth. Chemistry sought to understand how electrons move and predict new structures, physics was working on a coherent theory of matter and forces in the Standard Model, historians sought to understand previously understudies areas, etc. These new subjects were designed to destroy the current society that was viewed as racist, sexist, and homophobic. These ‘grievance studies’ areas had no requirements of ‘truth’, the standard was how much you could hate Western Civilization, Christianity, and white people. In fact, all of Western Civilization, our concepts of law and order, truth, even reality itself all come directly or secondarily from Christianity. By tearing that down, you end up in a magical place where reality doesn’t exist and the world can be anything you want it to be.
Now, you might think that such areas would have little appeal to students because most of them need their degree to get a job. Well, that is a concern parents have, many students aren’t exactly long-term thinkers. Also, the humanities faculty have had that covered for a long time with their ‘college isn’t to prepare you for a job, it is to teach you how to think’ and ’employers want a humanities education because we know how to think’. Add in the affirmative action programs. These admitted people with much lower test scores than the rest of the school. Many schools grade on a Gaussian curve, so such students were doomed to academic probation and expulsion…unless you could group them all together in classes without the rest of the student body, then they could form their own curve and thrive. So, the women and minority students admitted under affirmative action flocked to the ‘grievance studies’ areas out of necessity because they were at the wrong schools. The ‘grievance studies’ programs told them this was all because of racism and sexism (which is actually correct, just not the way they were taught) and they they should resent society for not giving them a 6-figure job out of college with their 1.8 GPA and a B.A. in intersectionality studies.
They are here because no one had the courage to stand up to the affirmative action crowd and no one stood up to the Marxists in the 1970’s. When this became really outrageous with the political correctness in the ’80’s and ’90’s was the time to stop it. Since that was allowed, all remaining conservatives were driven from academia and few were allowed in since. The viewpoint discrimination should have been banned at state universities at that point, but the courts didn’t have the guts. Now, they have taken over almost all of academia to the point that our physicians are being trained on female penises and taught that white physicians should not be allowed to practice on POC patients and probably shouldn’t be allowed in medial school at all. Now they are actively taking in and protecting lower-performing students by making boards pass-fail and other methods that make it impossible to know who the good students are.
Of late, there have been a few tongue-in-cheek videos lamenting that when 80s kids were coming up, in the first age of the Dept of Education, we were taught programs for “Just say No! to drugs”, “Stop, Drop, and Roll”, “Be careful of quicksand”, “Don’t take candy from a stranger or go to his van to see a puppy” and any number of far-fetched PSAs. The state of abortion talk strikes me much the same way. “Abortion is the only answer to teenage pregnancy and rape! What would you do in those situations without Abortion!”
It’s a lot policy by fear-mongering.
…but don’t get me wrong. I’m still on the legal abortion train. I just hate the state of discourse and our inability to come to an agreeable “safe and limited” state.
…and as I typed that, the conspiracy theorist in me wondered: “If abortion is most prevalent in low income, impoverished communities, how much does abortion cover up or surpress birth defects and viable class action lawsuits due to industrial poisoning, etc?”
If I had the gumption, I would create a character that is 100% a liberal democrat and that’ character’s schtick would be to espouse and support all of his liberal positions using all the wrong reasons.
Haven’t seen it yet, but isn’t that at least part of the schtick in Walsh’s Am I Racist? movie.
I am always fascinated that posts like this one draw the most comments, usually exploring the broader issues (Michael R’s comments are excellent examples of that – he writes not just about some idiots giving a conference that should be ridiculed from start to finish, but also about the underlying trend in academia to reject logic and reason and in their place substitute grievance and totalitarianism; Michael is routinely passionate and insightful).
jvb
Rich in CT makes valid points about women in the workplace and breastfeeding. But the medical community was discouraging this natural process in the 40’s and 50’s because you cannot measure the milk produced, and you cannot sterilize it. They weren’t evil … sterilization and sanitizing protocols had been improving mortality rates in hospitals, so they wanted to extend the benefits to maternity wards, where fatality rates were high. They just didn’t realize that all the sterilization benefits applied solely to labor and delivery. Once entrenched it was very difficult to reverse the bottle trend.
And for those who can help a new mother – if she is healthy, nourished, hydrated, and at least somewhat rested, a new mother having trouble is probably suffering from stress and anxiety. Relaxation breathing and exercises that you learn in birthing classes, yoga or pilates can help the milk coming in and more importantly, letting down. La Leche League is still a good resource.
Grandma Lisa