On: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

I must tell you what I read today, though it sits heavy upon my heart. The physicians in Philadelphia speak of fevers and humors, of bleeding and blisters, but here in Braintree, I read of poisons in the very milk that sustains our infants. They say the breast milk of mothers in Seattle is tainted with chemicals that disrupt the natural order of life itself. I think of my own children, now grown, but I remember the weight of a nursing babe at my breast, the trust in those tiny hands clutching my gown. If such corruption can lurk in the purest sustenance God intended for our young, what then becomes of the covenant between mother and child?

You have not mentioned whether these chemicals are born of our own making - our factories, our dyes, our artifices meant to ease labor but which now poison the very cradle. I recall when John brought home samples of new fabrics from Europe, so fine and bright, and I praised their sheen. But at what cost? The ledger of our household has never accounted for such hidden debits. The price of bread rises when the wheat is blighted by blight, but who measures the cost of a child’s first laughter silenced by a body grown strange from its mother’s milk?

If this continues, what will become of the next generation? Shall we wrap our babes in wool dyed with these poisons, rock them in cribs varnished with them, feed them from spoons tainted by them? The kitchen table, where I once taught my children their letters, may yet become a place of reckoning. I see now that the same hands that stir the porridge must also guard the well from which the water flows. The domestic lens is not merely sentiment - it is survival. We cannot legislate wisdom into being, but we can cease pouring the poison into the stream.