I’m a fresh graduate, a young adult, in my early 20s. Honestly, motherhood is the farthest from my mind right now. If not for my future stepkids, the motherly instinct wouldn’t have been sparked in me.
Well, it’s important for a woman to take care of herself when she is carrying a child. It is important for her to monitor what she takes in her body, and it is also important that she be discerning with the products her doctor would recommend.
There has been a rise in the sales of milk for mothers-to-be. Parents want their children to be “Superbabies”: able to talk before the rugrats turn a year old. But with all these vitamins, these chemicals that turn good ol’ cow’s milk into formulas purported to turn babies into people from Krypton, why don’t we, parents and future parents, ask if they are wholly safe?
Take for instance the case of a certain milk from New Zealand. Its popularity has risen, owing to viral advertisements on TV. Claiming to help in assuring the optimal development and the intelligence of babies, this milk has become a staple in physicians’ list of things to push on their patients.
I have nothing against doctors trying to chase after their quotas, if these products they push help the people they aim to help. But, if these products do more harm than good, I wonder if the health industry has forgotten the reason why they are an institution in the first place.
Perhaps, had I not heard these anecdotes, I would have drunk this milk too. But what I heard made me believe all the more that I want to be synthetic-chemical-free when I get pregnant.
What is it about this milk that made me averse to even the thought of hearing its name on my future husband’s lips? Well, my mother’s friend has an autistic daughter. She brought this daughter to a psychiatrist specializing in developmental diseases. In the course of her daughter’s clinical checkups, she chatted with the other mothers who had autistic children too. Their chilling discovery? They all drank the exact same milk in their pregnancy.
What is more eerie to me is that: my father’s friend’s wife, because she and her husband desperately wanted to have children with my “brains” (yes, modesty be damned!), they turned to this milk to ensure their kids’ giftedness. The result? They now have two autistic children.
Now I do not know what this means to the prospective parent reading this. But what I do know is that to me, this is a call to keep things natural in my future pregnancy/ies. And to me, the implication is also that the nutriceutical company in question should look into this phenomenon in an objective, scientific way. Meaning, they should conduct a research into the incidence of autism in children whose mothers drank their milk in pregnancy. They should seek to see whether my parents’ friends’ claims tally up against controlled experiments and exhaustive research. I also believe that this means that we as parents and future parents should be more vigilant in terms of our children’s and our own health. We should not swallow what the doctors push without enough research first.
One of the problems is that, when I researched online whether there are recorded incidences of the milk-and-autism phenomenon, my searches turned up empty. So does this mean that these are isolated cases?
But if they are isolated cases, how do you explain that my dad’s friend had two kids in a row who have autism? These kids were the only kids with whom he made his wife take this milk. This friend had other children from a previous marriage, and they were normal.
How do you explain that my mother’s friend had several other normal children and this is the one child that got a developmental disorder? This child was also the only one for whom she drank the milk. How do you explain too, that almost all the other moms who are under the same doctor with her all drank the said milk while they were pregnant?
These are questions that are worth following. For the sake of all the kids out there who just might acquire autism because of this product that seems to be biological warfare in a milk can.