CDC’s Perverted Guidance on ‘Chestfeeding’ Shows Ideological Corruption of Administrative State
Guidance on “chestfeeding” infants has been issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, headquartered in Atlanta. (Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually has issued official guidance for “nonbinary” people on how to “chestfeed” infants.
This latest woke lunacy isn’t just a disturbing policy. In a larger sense, it demonstrates how powerful governmental institutions have been co-opted on behalf of a larger, elite-driven cultural revolution.
The CDC guidance, in isolation, is certainly disturbing.
The public health agency’s website explains:
Some transgender parents who have had breast/top surgery may wish to breastfeed, or chestfeed (a term used by some transgender and non-binary parents) their infants. Healthcare providers working with these families should be familiar with medical, emotional, and social aspects of gender transitions to provide optimal family-centered care and meet the nutritional needs of the infant.
We are apparently supposed to believe that the secretions produced by these men interested in “chestfeeding”—many of whom are on serious hormones—is the same as it is for women, and that it’s entirely safe for infants.
But it seems there are some serious health risks here that the CDC is ignoring.
My colleague at The Daily Signal, reporter Mary Margaret Olohan, cataloged mothers who blasted the CDC’s guidance.
Are babies being used as props for some kind of twisted sexual fetish? Do the folks who run the CDC even care?
Given the CDC’s track record, it’s not far-fetched to assume that not only are officials there conveniently overlooking some facts about the safety of “chestfeeding,” they are prioritizing the desires of the radical transgender movement over the health of children.
After all, the CDC has poured significant resources into furthering LGBTQ+ causes in K-12 schools.
Can you imagine the CDC or any other federal agency under President Joe Biden ever telling transgender activists that some of its desires could be harmful or destructive? Not a chance.
The CDC’s “chestfeeding” guidance came from the “Health Equity Considerations” portion of the agency’s website. That’s the section where you put on the blinders and pretend the CDC is giving medical advice.
This really is part of a broader shift in how government agencies operate.
The massive growth in the administrative state, which began in the early 20th century in the United States, was justified by the idea of technocratic “expertise” effectively taking the place of limited self-government.
With the growth of societies, so early progressive thinkers surmised, there was a need to shift away from the messy politics of the past. Instead of traditional, give-and-take deliberative politics—which relied on a careful balance of interests and a healthy dose of statesmanship—we would have an army of empowered, “nonpartisan” experts who would look out for our interests in the name of democracy.
To a large extent, the sales pitch worked. Congress has been severely diminished. The courts now defer to government agencies not only to make the rules of our society, but even to police themselves.
Our government has strayed far from the system of checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Worse, it became ripe for ideological capture. Now it’s been captured. And with Biden at the helm of the executive branch, the revolution has accelerated.
Although government agencies still rely on appeals to authority and expertise, they now have become willing to overtly abandon that justification in the name of ideology.
What are you going to do, vote them out of office?
This development makes the modern administrative state more akin to an established church than the nonpartisan government by scientific experts dreamed up by Woodrow Wilson and his progressive allies of yesteryear. We now have a kind of left-wing integralism.
That doesn’t mean more people will hold fast to our newly established church of “science.” In fact, by most measures, this ideological shift has caused a societywide collapse in institutional trust. Only committed liberals stay true to the faith.
It says something terrible about modern Western societies that our most powerful institutions and government agencies have been so quick to sacrifice women and children on the altar of ideology.
As mortifying as it is, at the very least this left-wing institutional extremism is opening the eyes of many Americans, who are disturbed by what we are becoming.
The images of a woman having her face smashed by a man playing women’s sports, a child missing flesh on an arm because of gender-reassignment surgery, and, now, helpless babies being abused to service the fantasy of male “chestfeeding”—these are all images that finally have provoked a serious response.
We now can see quite clearly what’s at stake. Perhaps witnessing and then resisting the mutilation of the West will help us stave off the suicide of the West that will surely follow.
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