By Kathy Abbott for her blog The Curious Lactivist
4 February 2010
“…the lactivists were never thinking about what the infants of Haiti actually needed; they were thinking of themselves and their personal obsession with breastfeeding.” Dr Amy Tuteur.
A few days ago I wrote about the donations of American breast milk that were left sitting unused inside the freezer of the USNS Comfort and I wondered had those two Styrofoam coolers been filled with donated blood would they have been treated so cavalierly. Now it appears that the very existence of those two coolers is to be considered proof positive that all lactivists are indeed self absorbed “nipple Nazis”.
As they say “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Let’s get a few things straight: first of all, there was already a staff member on board the ship who was donating her own pumped milk. Coast Guard Lt. Teresa Wolf, a physician assistant who was pumping milk for her ten week old baby back in North Carolina when she started donating her extra milk. Secondly yes, the there was an actual request for more donated milk. (This was not the crazy idea of some pump crazed mother a thousand miles away!) The USNS Comfort placed a small request for 500 ounces of milk which was delivered (still frozen) two days later. And thirdly, yes once word got out a grass roots cry for more milk spread quickly across the country. Offers to donate milk came from every corner of the land.
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