Julie to La Leche League: Suck it

According to Salon.com's Broadsheet, La Leche League has booked so-called "comic mom" Tricia Shore, who writes under the name Tricia Smith Vaughan and whom some of you will remember from others' well-crafted rants, to speak at a dinner celebrating LLL's 50th anniversary.

A sampling of Vaughan's pro-woman, pro-family building opinions on a few topics that may be of interest to you...

On women postponing conception by using birth control pills:

Girls could choose any guy we wanted, have sex with him, come away with little if any emotional attachment, and choose to not become pregnant. Or choose not to continue pregnancy.

What happens to women who have too many choices? We become overstressed and tired and cranky and depressed and have other maladies from the choice of it all. [...]  We became so good at supposedly doing all this choosing stuff that we forgot that sex was connected to something that it had been connected to for at least thousands of years. Some did so much of this forgetting, and did it so well, that when it came time to have a baby, well, they forgot. We'd been forgetting for a long time and then, suddenly, we were supposed to remember that sex produces a baby, but we forgot the whole sex-leads-to-a-baby thing because pills and birth control and women's magazines have told us that sex leads to fun and glamour and prestige, but not necessarily to a baby.     

[A]lready, in our brave new world, women who say they want a baby have no time for sex. What will happen when their artificially conceived offspring cries and needs his or her mommy? Never mind, she'll be working and doing other important stuff. The nanny or day care will be there, for a fee, of course.

A generation of women are too busy to have sex and are so disconnected from nature that some must hire a doctor and a test tube to conceive. As a result, a generation of children will be saying, "Where's my mommy?" And through the silence, they will receive a reply: She is much too busy to care.

...which postponement can lead to assisted reproduction:

When one is too busy with career, travel, and other amenities to have sex, one turns to the medical community: Women "are prepared to pay thousands of pounds for private IVF treatments — even though they have unpleasant and potentially harmful side effects — because they believe it offers them the best chance of 'instant pregnancy'."          

Pregnancy should never be worth the wait, should it? After all, we grew up with instant oatmeal, solid-state television, instant gratification of every sort. And yet all that took too long. Now we are having trouble waiting to conceive. Who cares about those nasty side effects — we want to conceive and we want it NOW!

 ...which might eventually in its turn lead to adoption:

With stranger adoption, we take children from their natural families and place them with families that aren't their own, asking everyone to pretend that these children belong in those families.

The next time you become angry at a couple who claims to be "two mommies," [Not that often, Tricia. — Julie] ask yourself how often you've capitulated to the rhetoric of this brave new world, how often you've called someone who's never given birth and passed along genes a mother, or how often you've looked at an Asian child with two people who are clearly not her parents and believed that they are family.

...or, if you conceive and deliver, postpartum depression:

We follow celebrities, especially when they tell us how we should think. One reason for the recent post-partum depression epidemic, of course, is mental health spokesperson Brooke Shields. [A quick search of PubMed reveals that no studies have yet been published fingering Ms. Shields as Patient Zero.  Perhaps those are still undergoing careful peer review. — Julie]

Brooke really should know better than to prostitute herself to the mental health industry...I have a real problem with her promoting post-partum depression and so easily taking the medications that made everything bright and cheery again, supposedly.  The old-fashioned kind of prostitution, sans government intervention, harms few people. With the newfangled Brooke  Shields-mental-health-prostitution, many new moms read her book and say, "That’s me!" And then the moms jump on the post-partum depression bandwagon themselves, along with the little pills that supposedly cure the depression.  [C'mon.  What are you waiting for?  All the cool kids are doing it.  What are you, chicken? — Apparently Brooke, Julie, and others]

Ah, but now we come to it:

By the way, breastfeeding your newborn helps your hormones to return to normal, but how many times do you read this fact when you hear about post-partum depression? Instead of promoting this natural hormone regulator, Brooke was paid by the formula industry to promote bottlefeeding.  

You see, it seems that Vaughan, or Shore, is a breastfeeding advocate who was barred from performing at a comedy club when she attempted to take the stage with her infant son in a sling.  According to the club's management, bringing in the baby would have violated California's liquor control laws, which prohibit people under 21 from entering bars.

So on that score, LLL's interest in Shore, or Vaughan, who's spoken at a LLL gathering in the past, is understandable.  I can only assume they were unable to find another woman who'd been discriminated against because she breastfed.  I'm sure they combed this great bottle-feeding nation of ours and came up dry in their search for another advocate who could speak forcefully but wittily on the topic of nursing without all the troublesome anti-mother baggage.

With such ugly attitudes towards other women, mothers and those who hope to be, I find it hard to believe Shore's really as funny as she thinks she is.  But then maybe I don't have much of a sense of humor, because her presence at the LLL dinner sounds like a lousy fucking joke to me.

Update: mamacrab writes, "Just called LLL to complain. The woman on the phone told me the speaker has been CANCELLED! I asked if she was cancelled due to complaints and she said yes."