Ruth Lewis remembers the exact moment she decided to take
a stand against the breastfeeding charity she spent more than a decade volunteering for.
As the editor of
Breastfeeding Matters, the flagship magazine for the British arm of the La Leche League, a charity set up to support women to breastfeed, she says she was asked in the summer of 2023 to pull an article that used “mother-centred language”.
She was advised to replace it with a piece written by a leader of one of the charity’s breastfeeding groups that employed more gender-neutral terminology instead, in line with the organisation’s move to open up meetings to
males who identify as women.
“The final straw was that the concluding line of the article was about ‘supporting parents with infant feeding choices’,” Lewis, 49, says. “I just thought, ‘That is not what we do. I cannot tolerate this anymore,’ so I resigned.”
But little did she realise her decision to step down would lead to her becoming embroiled in a bitter fight over transgender women (biological men, in other words) being permitted to join breastfeeding support groups – one that would eventually lead to her being ousted from the charity altogether.
The dispute has attracted particular attention given La Leche League’s reputation as the world’s oldest breastfeeding charity – founded in 1956 by a group of American mothers to support women struggling to nurse their babies.
It was named after an historic depiction of a breastfeeding Virgin Mary named “Nuestra Senora de la Leche y Buen Parto” (Our lady of plentiful milk and happy delivery). At the time of the charity’s founding, it simply was not acceptable to publicly use the word “breast”.
But more than seven decades later, Lewis says the term “breast” has once again become taboo in some quarters of the charity – albeit for very different reasons this time around.
She claims La Leche League is being “destroyed from within” by “
ideologues” who believe it is bigoted for a breastfeeding charity only to serve biological females and that using words like “breast” or “mother” will offend trans people.
The mother-of-two does not make such allegations lightly, given her ongoing association with the organisation. After resigning from her editorial role, Lewis set her sights on making a change within the charity from the top, and was elected as a trustee just months later.
However, her efforts to keep La Leche League meetings single-sex came to a crushing end on November 16 when she and five other trustees of La Leche League GB (LLLGB) – half of the British leadership council – were voted out en-masse at the charity’s Annual General Meeting.
Lewis says those who lost their positions had simply been fighting for mothers to have a female-only space, at a time when many feel at their most vulnerable, in which they could be supported by other women breastfeeding their babies. But for daring to suggest these sensitive female gatherings should not be opened up to trans women who have taken drugs to induce lactation, the former trustees were vilified as transphobic and forced out, she claims.
“We have been portrayed as being anti-inclusion and anti-trans, but this is not about gender identity – this is about sex,” Lewis says. “Of course we would support a trans man [a woman who identifies as male] who has not undergone a mastectomy and needs breastfeeding support.
“But when we were talking about the inclusion of trans women who want to breastfeed, then those individuals are male – because, like it or not, you can only be a trans woman if you were born male. And if you allow males into the support groups there are going to be a significant number of women who will self-exclude.
“I’m talking about women who have been in abusive relationships, Muslim women who will not undress or breastfeed with a man in the room or vulnerable mums who have just had a baby and are still sore, struggling to breastfeed. [The charity’s leadership] says this is about being kind, but I can’t see it that way myself.”
The ejection of Lewis and the other trustees from office was the culmination of a torrid year, which also saw them stripped of their accreditation to lead breastfeeding groups by the global arm of the charity in America – La Leche League International (LLLI).
Meanwhile, another trustee, Miriam Main, who had stood with them on the trans women issue, felt compelled to resign at the beginning of this month amid bullying allegations. Even more shocking was the resignation a few weeks ago of the charity’s 94-year-old founder, Marian Tompson, who criticised the move to admit trans women as “indulging the fantasies of adults”.
Lewis says she is deeply “saddened” that the struggle to ensure British breastfeeding groups remain a place where only biological females can seek support and sanctuary appears to have ended in this manner. “It was set up so perfectly for mothers supporting mothers and now it’s been twisted and that is heartbreaking,” she says.
Lewis’s exit from the charity ended a more than 15-year association with La Leche League, which began when she attended a breastfeeding support session at her local library with her three-month-old daughter.
Before long she was a regular at the meetings and was eventually asked if she would like to lead the gatherings, which she happily agreed to. Musing on the attraction of the charity in those early days, Lewis says: “As so many LLL leaders talk about, it just feels right for a lot of mums to use the biology that we’ve got as a way to mother.”
However, it was after a pivot from leading meetings to editing LLLGB’s
Breastfeeding Matters magazine in 2019 that concerns started to creep in. Lewis noticed that some volunteer leaders were submitting articles for publication using phrases such as “breastfeeding families” rather than mothers.
The change in language came after the introduction of the charity’s controversial policy to allow transgender women to attend its breastfeeding support meetings, Lewis says. LLLGB’s chairman Helen Lloyd was quoted at the time saying “the world was moving on” and that in order to keep up, the organisation had to be more inclusive. “Leaders were being encouraged to add gender-neutral terms into their vocabulary,” Lewis says. “It wasn’t something I was particularly comfortable with, but I felt I had to go along with it to an extent.”
However, after being asked to replace the article focused on “mothers” for one that talked about “parents” and “infant feeding” she realised she could no longer tolerate the shift and handed in her notice. What followed, Lewis says, was a somewhat bizarre conversation with the publication’s director in which she apparently attempted to defend the practice of male lactation to feed babies, induced through a process of taking birth control hormones and an anti-nausea drug.
“I said that there wasn’t any research to support it and she claimed there was plenty because they use the same [method], which is called the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, to induce lactation just like a mother would,” Lewis says. “I pointed out that it’s a different physiology with trans women and you can’t just transfer that across as though it’s exactly the same. But she didn’t seem to get that, which is really concerning.”
Lewis decided to go public with her worries about the charity’s agreement to support biological males to “chestfeed” babies on its private Facebook page for volunteers. But the post was swiftly removed amid accusations she was a “discriminatory transphobe”.
It was this “shutting down” of the conversation, Lewis says, that convinced her that she needed to take more drastic action and attempt to enact change from the top by standing for election as a trustee. She was not alone in this thinking and in October last year, she and a number of like-minded LLL leaders were elected to the organisation’s Council of Directors. They got to work straight away to challenge, in Britain at least, some of the moves that were changing the face of the charity, including the adoption of gender-neutral language and the opening up of breastfeeding meetings to trans women.
The key, they claim, was that an organisation which had been established to provide mother-to-mother support for breastfeeding had appeared to have changed its charitable objectives to extend this help to males. But the new trustees quickly discovered that they faced a major roadblock in a minority of trustees who wanted to see the inclusion of trans women and brought in La Leche League International (LLLI) to support their position. “They tried to force us to concede that trans women were our beneficiaries because they were mothers, in inverted commas,” Lewis says. In no uncertain terms, the LLLI board informed the trustees questioning the trans policy that they must support everyone to “breastfeed” or “chestfeed” babies with human milk, she claims.
The divisions became yet more entrenched when official complaints were made to the board about the six LLLGB trustees opposing the admission of trans women by their fellow trustees on the Council of Directors. According to Lewis, among the issues raised in the complaint was their insistence the word “mother” should not be disassociated from its legal definition derived from the female biological function of giving birth to a child.
The disagreement, which went to the heart of the charity’s raison d’être, eventually exploded into the public arena in April this year when the six embattled trustees decided to share correspondence sent to the international board laying out their concerns with the trans policy with the more than 200 breastfeeding group leaders across the country.
The fallout was immediate. La Leche League International responded by suspending the accreditation of the trustees to lead breastfeeding meetings, putting their places on the Council of Directors in jeopardy. At the same time, the six found themselves being publicly denounced by both group leaders and fellow trustees who supported the moves to make the charity “inclusive” of trans women.
Matters only escalated from there, with Lewis lodging a serious incident report in May with the Charity Commission over “a breakdown in governance” within the British La Leche League and what she claimed was interference from the American branch. The report later found its way into the press and triggered a failed bid by their opponents to have the six trustees removed from their posts through an extraordinary general meeting.
But earlier this month, Lewis and her allied trustees had to accept defeat after losing a vote to be re-elected during a charged AGM at which she says they were accused of both “conflicts of interest” and “gross misconduct”.
“While both of these accusations were quickly and thoroughly refuted, when something like that is heard you cannot unhear it,” Lewis says. “We will never know whether it had an influence on the outcome. Whatever the case, we lost, which was both a disappointment and, after a year of horrible bullying and stress, something of a relief.”
However, the group has not completely given up their mission and there is talk of setting up a new single-sex breastfeeding charity for mothers, which Lewis is confident there will be public support for.
“We’ve had dozens of communications and not one has been in favour of including males in breastfeeding meetings,” she says. “There were emails from mums saying: ‘I’m pregnant and I was looking for somewhere for support but now I know I can’t come to you.’
“We’ve also had health professionals saying this is not OK. It’s desperately sad that these women now cannot turn to the La Leche League for help.”
