Ricki Lake wants to do for the Pill what Jenny McCarthy did for vaccines.
Lake, like McCarthy, is a mama-shill.
What’s a mama-shill? A mama-shill is a woman who believes that gestating and giving birth to a human being has magically rendered her qualified to shill on pretty much anything related to reproduction and children. Mama-shills make a business out of bamboozling other mothers. What are her characteristics?
- Anti-intellectualism? Check.
- Belief in ludicrous conspiracy theories? Check.
- Advanced education? Surely you jest?
- Knowledge of biology, statistics and epidemiology? What are those?
[pullquote align=”right” color=”#000000″ ]They’re not pro-preventable death; they just want to be free to profit from it.[/pullquote]
Mama-shills make up for their profound deficiency in actual knowledge by their reliance on discredited members of the medical profession or self-proclaimed experts who are recognized as experts by no one but themselves. McCarthy venerates Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who was stripped of his medical license for a faulty study attempting to discredit the MMR vaccine in order to pave the way for profiting from his own formulation of the vaccine.
For a forthcoming documentary, Ricki Lake has allied herself with Holly Grigg-Spall, the journalist who wrote the book, Sweetening the Pill. In a devastating deconstruction of the book, Lindsay Beyerstein notes:
…Grigg-Spall makes a series of seemingly contradictory claims about the capitalist-medical-feminist bloc that is supposedly bullying women into taking the pill: 1) The pill is popular because it turns women into emotionally stable and industrious workers who never miss a day of work or bleed on the shop floor and because the economy needs women’s “passivity, anxiety and emotionality.” 2) The pill is the modern-day equivalent of the 19th-century practice of “female castration,” which was used to desexualize women, and the pill is promoted as part of a feminist scheme to make women more alluring and available to men. 3) The pill kills female libido, and the pill fuels the supposed epidemic of sluttiness known as “raunch culture.” Does the pill masculinize, ultrafeminize, or unsex women entirely? Grigg-Spall claims all of the above!
Grigg-Spall isn’t sure what the Pill does, but she’s sure she wants to demonize it. And Ricki Lake is attempting to make a documentary from her book because she wants to demonize the Pill, too, so she can profit from the demonization. Lake employs the same tactics that McCarthy used to create fear of vaccination.
- Faulty “science.”
- Disingenuous claims of “merely questioning” established science.
- Refusing to address or even acknowledge scientific criticsm.
- Accusing anyone who disagrees of being a Pharma-shill.
- Banning dissent from websites and Facebook pages promoting the product.
Lake, like McCarthy, is in the business of bamboozling other mothers for attention and profit. All of which would be fine if people didn’t die as a result. McCarthy created an empire of books, organizations, articles and appearances built on a lie that killed children. She grossly exaggerated the dangers of vaccines and grossly minimized the much greater dangers of vaccine preventable diseases for fun and profit. As a result vaccine preventable diseases (such as pertussis, measles and even diphtheria) that were effectively eradicated have made a comeback and children have died. McCarthy is still shilling unrepentantly.
Ricki Lake, following Grigg-Spall, is grossly exaggerating the dangers of the Pill while grossly minimizing the much greater dangers of unwanted pregnancy and untreated conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovary disease for attention and profit. Like all Mama-shills, she camouflages her ruthless business sense under the guise of “educating” other mothers.
McCarthy is not anti-vaccine; she just want to be free to question vaccines. Lake is not anti-Pill; she just wants to be free to question it. They’re not pro-preventable death; they just want to be free to profit from it.
Ricki Lake wants to do for the Pill what Jenny McCarthy did for vaccines … and we all know how well that turned out.
