A Statement Against the Exploitation of Motherhood

This unisex tee confronts the hidden violence of the dairy industry, a system sustained through forced reproduction, bodily control, and the systematic destruction of maternal bonds. Milk production is not a passive process but one that depends on repeated violation, loss, and grief, inflicted on sentient beings whose capacity for attachment and distress is deliberately ignored.

Within industrial dairy farming, cows are artificially inseminated again and again to keep their bodies producing milk. Pregnancy is imposed as a requirement, not a choice, and the natural rhythms of motherhood are overridden by schedules designed for yield. Their value is measured only by output, while physical exhaustion, emotional suffering, and long-term trauma are treated as acceptable costs.

Calves are removed shortly after birth, a practice that causes intense and prolonged distress. Mothers cry out and search, while babies are confined, isolated, or killed. Male calves are frequently slaughtered within days or funnelled into veal production. Female calves are retained only to replace their mothers, continuing the same cycle of exploitation. What should be care becomes extraction. What should be connection becomes loss.

Image as Testimony

The artwork captures a moment of irreversible separation. A mother cow stands confined behind bars, her body restrained and her gaze fixed on her calf as he is pulled away. The barrier between them is both physical and symbolic, representing the systems that enforce separation while denying its emotional cost. The calf’s fear is immediate and visible, his small body tense as human hands claim him as property. The mother’s presence is reduced to helpless witness, unable to protect or comfort. The scene reflects the routine reality of dairy production, where maternal instinct is overridden by force, and the bond between mother and child is treated as an obstacle to profit rather than something sacred.

A Declaration of Moral Reckoning

“To turn motherhood into a mechanism and babies into byproducts is the deepest betrayal of nature.”

This statement confronts the moral core of the dairy industry. It names what is too often obscured: the conversion of reproduction into a tool, and of newborn lives into waste or commodities. Motherhood: one of the strongest and most instinctive bonds in the natural world, is stripped of meaning and reduced to function. Babies are removed not because it is necessary, but because their existence interferes with extraction.

The slogan rejects the idea that this violence is neutral, normal, or unavoidable. It challenges the language that disguises suffering behind terms like production, efficiency, and husbandry. At its heart, the message is a refusal to accept a system that requires the destruction of care, attachment, and life itself in order to operate.

Each piece stands as A Declaration of Freedom for All Beings, affirming that motherhood is not a resource, reproduction is not a machine, and no life should be reduced to a byproduct of profit.

Campaign Colour & Vintage Options

This design is anchored in its dedicated campaign colour: Off White, and is also available in one of four shared vintage core colours.

Off White reflects sterility, control, and erasure, the colour of artificial insemination rooms, mechanised milking systems, and environments stripped of warmth or autonomy. It mirrors how maternal relationships are reduced to procedures, and how suffering is sanitised through clinical language and pastoral imagery.

The absence of warmth in Off White speaks to loss: calves taken, mothers left behind, and lives drained of meaning until bodies are exhausted and discarded.

Wear Your Values

This is a refusal to accept motherhood as a means of extraction.
A stand against systems that depend on separation, loss, and enforced reproduction.
A declaration that maternal bonds are not expendable.

Wear your values in defence of connection, compassion, and the right of all beings to remain with their young.

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