CDC Offers Guidance on ‘Chestfeeding’
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/emergencies-infant-feeding/health-equity.html
https://washingtonstand.com/news/cdc-offers-guidance-on-chestfeeding
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is offering guidance for men identifying as transgender on how to breastfeed and insisting on using the “inclusive” term “chestfeeding.” The CDC
released advice this week for men taking hormones to grow breasts, explaining, “Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).” The CDC also gave some examples of alternative terminology for breastfeeding to cater to those identifying as transgender, “such as nursing, chestfeeding, or bodyfeeding.”
The CDC further noted that those identifying as transgender “may need help with … maximizing milk production, supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk or formula, medication to induce lactation or avoiding medications that inhibit lactation, suppressing lactation (for those choosing not to breastfeed or chestfeed)…”
The guidance is drawing criticism from doctors who note that the hormone drugs taken by men wanting to “chestfeed” may be dangerous for the baby being fed. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned that at least one of the hormone drugs frequently used “can pass into breast milk in small amounts and can sometimes give babies an irregular heartbeat as a result.” Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons,
told the Daily Mail that “we have no idea what the long-term effects on the child will be. … The CDC has a responsibility to talk about the health risks, but they have been derelict in doing that.”