Jess enters the fray over “attachment parenting” (e.g. breastfeeding your kids until their college acceptance letters arrive, sleeping with them in one big bed every night, etc.). To catch up on the dispute over whether Los Angeles lactivist Chtistine Msggiore had a right to breastfeed her children knowing that she was HIV-positive (her breastfed 3-year-old-daughter died of AIDS-related pneumonia in May), click here and also onto Cathy Seipp’s column for National Review Online. Writes Jess:
“Although I’m not very uncomfortable with some aspects of attachment parenting, Ms. Maggiore is bordering on the criminal. The reader who wrote and claimed that this is about parental rights is way off base.
“Ms. Maggiore is engaging in reckless endangerment and should be charged and held accountable for her actions, and her physicians are exacerbating the problem and should be charged with criminal negligence for failing to test and diagnose her daughter with HIV or AIDS prior to her death. Ms. Maggiore and her doctors failed that little girl miserably and brought about her death by their own greed and selfishness. If Ms. Maggiore were letting her children run around with scissors unattended, and one was injured or killed, she would be charged. It is no different to nurse while HIV-positive when it is common knowledge that almost anything that enters a woman’s body is passed through breast milk.
“This is why I have seen friends who’ve nursed their children not take cold medications and even have one who couldn’t have dairy products because her son is lactose intolerant. Maybe the comments about attachment parenting are about parental rights, but a woman who knowingly nurses her child despite being HIV-positive is about public safety and the health of children.”
I can’t judge whether criminal prosecution is appropriate in this case, but it seems to me that there was a gross abdication of the parental responsibilities that go along with parental rights–and also an abdication of responsibilities by physicians and advocacy groups that should know better. Isn’t it about time for La Leche League to quit waffling on the issue of breastfeeding by AIDS mothers?