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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   27209 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years, or providing the skin contact and natural maternal affection that leads to healthy offspring. And because women are averse to pairing with men below their income unless the men compensate with unusual attractiveness, they have a lower rate of marriage than they would otherwise have. And because the school years are intense, they are delaying marriage. This dysgenic effect is more serious than the economic inefficiency effect, because you can’t easily produce more high iq citizens. In a pronatal culture, high iq women have more children than average, learning the skills of husband-acquiring and homemaking at an earlier age.

Besides AWFLs being perhaps the most likely demographic to breastfeed, there's no convincing evidence for benefits of breastfeeding outside of a slight reduction in minor rashes or gastrointestinal upset in babies. Nobody has demonstrated long-run benefits for the child of any kind.

This... doesn't pass the sniff test. Formula almost certainly isn't quite as good as breastmilk and we know early childhood nutrition is very important.

It's a subject ripe for a more classic 'political correctness' to overtake it since there are mothers out there who can not breastfeed and the notion that these loving parents are depriving their children of optimal nutrition and upbringing is charged to say the least.

If you've ever been in a maternity ward it's difficult to convey how hard the staff pushes for breastfeeding. In my deep blue area mothers who just had a C section and have a baby in the NICU are constantly pressured to breastfeed (despite the pain from the surgery site while holding the baby) and pump to provide milk to the baby. All the usual progressive suspects (WHO, APA) are pro-breastfeeding. We are very much in the "breast is best" era.

And having been around a person who could not breastfeed, the only reassurance that can possibly be offered is 'it doesn't really matter' and 'babies that are breastfed also get 'gastrointestinal upset' all the time, it's not your fault'.

I don't disagree that we are in the "breast is best" era, but the subject is nevertheless ripe for political correctness to overtake it.

If political correctness were to overtake it, it would have already happened.

What would it look like if that happened? We'd get a bunch of studies showing powdered milk in a plastic bottle is just as good as actual milk from a mother's body, despite that being as crazy as claiming powdered milk is just as good as regular milk.

If it happened, the official recommendations from the AAP and the WHO would be ambivalent between breastfeeding and formula. Is that the recommendation? No? Then no, it hasn't happened.

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