A vegan couple in Queens, NY have been convicted of assault for starving their 15-month old daughter, who weighed 10 pounds, had no teeth, suffered broken bones (from lack of calcium) and damage to her internal organs. They had fed her “ground nuts and fruits,” according to the NY Times, and her mother did not breast feed her.
I know that vegans do not use any animal products – does this include human breast milk? How do committed vegans feed infants, who need protein and calcium in order to thrive?
I confess I find it difficult to understand refusing to use honey, milk or eggs, which do not involve any injury to an animal, and which (baring inhumane raising) are freely given. It seems rather like refusing to listen to birds sing.
I am sincere in wanting to hear from vegans, and hope you will not be offended by my questions. I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian who breast fed my 5 children until they were a year old, and allowed them to choose their diet when they started school. All of them ate meat at some time, but are now vegetarians, tho one eats fish occasionally.
If I remember this case properly, the parents weren’t typical of vegans - they were on some kind of highly restrictive self-imposed diet of a very limited sort. It is possible to eat a completely vegan diet and be healthy. I’m not a vegan, but I suspect that any sensible vegan would consider breast-feeding permitted.
I hope this doesn’t become people’s impression of a vegan diet. Human breast milk is completely outside the realm of vegan philosophy.
I can’t believe they didn’t take the kid to a doctor sooner.
Before people go ballistic, I’ve got to add that commercial baby food can make your baby sick too.
I could not digest milk properly and was nearly died from dehydration before the doctors figured out what was wrong.
The real crime here was not making homemade vegan babyfood (although it is a stupid idea), but in not getting medical care sooner. Nothing in the article gave me any clue as to why they didn’t do that.
Before people go ballistic, I’ve got to add that commercial baby food can make your baby sick too.
I could not digest milk properly and was nearly died from dehydration before the doctors figured out what was wrong.
The real crime here was not making homemade vegan babyfood (although it is a stupid idea), but in not getting medical care sooner. Nothing in the article gave me any clue as to why they didn’t do that.
None of the articles I can find address the nursing issue, except to say the some of the nutrition experts called to testify state that vegans are not averse to nursing, and in fact often encourage it. Lacking that, they use soy forumulas. These articles all state that Ice was first given commercial formula and then switched to a homemade soy formula. By the time she was removed she was already 15 months, which is past the age most babies are still nursing/bottle-fed anyway, so it’s not likely she would be on any “formula” by then anyway, just milk, soy or otherwise.
Some of these articles also note that Mrs. Swinton has lost 150 pounds recently. If this weight loss coincided with childbirth, it’s very likely she was not getting enough calories to produce milk, which would be why the formulas were attempted.
Furthermore, I’m not really sure why they are being called vegans since their daughter was being fed cod-liver oil. Unless maybe they called themselves vegans, which I may have overlooked in this article.
This sounds like a horrible situation, but I don’t think nursing/not nursing was even an issue here.
Calling this couple vegans (even if they identify themselves this way) is similar to talking about “Mormon” practices when discussing some kook with a dozen wives or “Fundamentalist Christians” when some couple chains their kid to a bed and beats him/her with sticks because s/he spilled a cup of milk. There may be some tenuous connection between the nutcases’ original beliefs and some philosophical or theological movement, but they have obviously gone far off the deep end into lunacy.
There are a lot of vegans raising kids who never suffer malnutrition. This is simply one more case of suffering idiots to breed.
Hey, I just read the thread where Revtim related a story about a former associate who allowed himself to be eaten alive by a murderous cannibal.
So I guess we should all start ranting about those damned meat-eaters! They eat people, after all. Well, some of them do. Well, a few scant psychos do. Well…
Or, I could start ranting about Germans, since the cannibal psycho in question was German. So all germans are cannibal psychos. Well, some Germans are cannibal psychos. OK, so maybe only a few scant Germans are cannibal psychos. Uh…
Yeah, that situation has more to do with the parents being assholes than their adversion to animal products. I didn’t read any links because I don’t want to know the details. But those people knew their child was starving and did nothing to stop it. There is no way a rational person would think they were doing the right thing in that situation.
Young babies shouldn’t be given milk, eggs, or honey, anyway… But this child was 15 months old and could have eaten a varied, healthy diet. Hell, even within the confines of a vegan diet, she could have eaten a lot more variety than what it is said she was fed.
I’ve been vegan on and off in my lifetime, and although I would avoid animal products for myself (during those periods), I’d NEVER force that upon a growing child. I believe eating too much meat or too much dairy isn’t healthy, but to me it’s an opinion and I wouldn’t force my opinion on my child (by forcing them to be vegan.)
I also support breast feeding because it’s cheap (free!), easy, and specifically formulated for your baby! You can’t go wrong.
As well, some vegans disapprove of honey because it’s made from the labour of bees. Milk because it’s taken from cows. Eggs because it’s taken from chicken, and eggs are babies. Also, milk can have crap in it that was fed to the cows (like antibiotics). So some people consider it unhealthy for human consumption.
I never liked honey so that wasn’t a problem for me, I am lactose-intolerant so that wasn’t a problem for me, and I also get stomach-aches from eggs, so that wasn’t a problem for me either. heh
No vegan I know believes that breastmilk isn’t vegan. You can only get to that conclusion if you take it beyond its original intention and conflate the ends with the means, avoiding milk for the sake of avoiding milk.
The thing is, a fruit and nut diet isn’t Vegan anyway, its Fruitarian.
Thanks for your responses. Those who mentioned the lack of medical care are absolutely right, of course – but I wonder if this couple would have listened?
The father is borderline retarded and the mother was paranoid and very against the medical world. She would not take the baby to the doctor, even to be born. I’m sure she’s not playing with a full deck either.
Most vegans I know operate from an animal-rights perspective. My parents lived on The Farm, a Tennessee-based commune, during the early seventies, and the folks there were hard-core vegans. They didn’t even eat honey, because industrial honey production involves the use of machinery that kills a significant number of bees (or so they believed; I’ve never read anything about industrial honey production, so I don’t know if this is accurate).
Milk is generally avoided because even the best dairies sell male calves for veal or beef: it’s economically impossible to produce milk for market and not slaughter the males. And eggs are avoided because layer hen factories treat the hens pretty abominably.
I’ve met vegans who avoided leather, jello, and even sugar (because sugar is filtered through charcoaled cow bones). I’ve never met a vegan who would object to breast milk; that’s just crazy talking. (on these parents’ part, of course).
And McDuff, fruitarians are vegans, in the same way that vegans are vegetarians and vegetarians are food-eaters. They’re a subset of a larger group.
Most vegans I know operate from an animal-rights perspective. My parents lived on The Farm, a Tennessee-based commune, during the early seventies, and the folks there were hard-core vegans. They didn’t even eat honey, because industrial honey production involves the use of machinery that kills a significant number of bees (or so they believed; I’ve never read anything about industrial honey production, so I don’t know if this is accurate).
Milk is generally avoided because even the best dairies sell male calves for veal or beef: it’s economically impossible to produce milk for market and not slaughter the males. And eggs are avoided because layer hen factories treat the hens pretty abominably.
I’ve met vegans who avoided leather, jello, and even sugar (because sugar is filtered through charcoaled cow bones). I’ve never met a vegan who would object to breast milk; that’s just crazy talking. (on these parents’ part, of course).
And McDuff, fruitarians are vegans, in the same way that vegans are vegetarians and vegetarians are food-eaters. They’re a subset of a larger group.