My friend M. and I were having our Saturday morning breakfast together and as we jumped at light speed from topic to topic, always ending up far away from where we had begun, we stumbled over a thought that was compelling to us, namely, the circle politick. Both of us had chosen to have babies born at home and to long term nurse our children to a natural, baby led weaning. We consider ourselves, at least on this issue, to be far right conservatives because we lock step with women from the beginning of time and that stance makes us feel that politics is a circle. The far right and the far left meet around back. Six billion women who have lived on the face of the earth since the beginning of time have cared for infants in one way, but the "modern" standard of infant care would find these women odd, or perhaps dangerous. Occasionally, the news reports that children's services is called to investigate women who nurse their child past the age of two.

The standard of infant care is based on something other than science. "Normal" for women and children is now the domain of economics and its subsidiary, politics, to the degree that M. presented information that "science" debates whether human milk should be considered the standard infant food for human infants or should comparative studies on infant feeding use another standard? And what might that be? An interesting topic for Saturday morning.

(correlates: TerribleObstacles, Joan Benoit Samuelson on Growing Up, JudyReCommunication, ...)