Over the weekend the New York Times ran a piece about a bizarre fight at the United Nations over breast-feeding. The gist: The U.N.’s World Health Assembly was trying to pass a resolution encouraging breast-feeding and discouraging the use of formula . At which point the delegation from the United States essentially re-enacted the street-fight scene from Anchorman, threatening the sponsor nations with economic sanctions and even the withdrawal of military aid. Well, that escalated quickly.
The Times story is a little strange, however. It doesn’t actually quote the text of the resolution—beyond noting that it was designed to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and to stop the “inappropriate promotion of foods for infants and young children.” And then the story insinuates that the American delegation was merely doing the bidding of Big Formula. What’s even stranger is that in the end, the resolution passed anyway. So what’s the real story?
The real story, as always, is Trump. The president took to Twitter to attack the Times reporting:
The failing NY Times Fake News story today about breast feeding must be called out. The U.S. strongly supports breast feeding but we don’t believe women should be denied access to formula. Many women need this option because of malnutrition and poverty.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2018
And the left flocked to the piece as a way to attack Trump. The best response came from Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards:
So the administration is trying to end maternity coverage, birth control access, reproductive rights…,and now breastfeeding? What additional punishments for women are they thinking up? https://t.co/z0sBvHOgyX
— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) July 8, 2018
By Richards’ logic, it is okay for a woman to choose to kill her unborn child, but if she has the baby and wants to choose formula? Well, by God, we’re not savages!
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached one of those (rare) exalted moments where Trump is right.
No one has any idea whether the U.S. delegation was objecting to the breast-feeding resolution because they were simply doing the bidding of Big Formula. (This is a thing, by the way.) Maybe they were. But whatever the reason, it’s good that someone stood up to the lactation Nazis.
I have never met a woman who hasn’t had at least one bad encounter with a lactation counselor. Usually it happens in the hospital, postpartum, with first-time mothers. Suddenly some wild-eyed zealot appears and starts yammering on about the breast sandwich and the football hold and wondering whether you’ve “succeeded” yet with the latch and demanding that you not give up. Don’t get me wrong—the vast majority of lactation counselors are gentle and peace-loving souls. But there is a small minority—I’ve always thought of them as the Wahhabi lactationists—who take an uncompromosing view of the subject. Which, by the by, is not especially—or even at all—helpful to mothers.
Breast-feeding is great. For some babies and some women, it creates a beautiful bond that is unique in all of human nature. You know what’s also great? Formula. Man has poured decades of research and science—SCIENCE!—into creating a miraculous substance that provides tiny humans with all of the nutrients they need to grow and thrive. For some babies, and some women, formula works better than breast-feeding. And vice versa.
Is one mode of feeding babies superior to the other? One study claims that if everyone breast-fed instead of using formula, it would save 823,000 children’s lives (and $300 billion) every single year. Imagine how many children (and how much money) we could save if every woman in the world would just submit to the truth that “Breast Is Best”?
On the other hand, not all studies agree. (You know how it is with studies.) In fact, you might want to read this pretty definitive 2009 piece about breast-feeding from Hanna Rosin in the Atlantic. Rosin went to Stanford and has a show on NPR—and she was raised entirely on formula! Crazy, right? Here’s Rosin:
Since the identification of sIgA, in 1961, labs have hunted for other marvels. Could the oligosaccharides in milk prevent diarrhea? Do the fatty acids boost brain development? The past few decades have turned up many promising leads, hypotheses, and theories, all suggestive and nifty but never confirmed in the lab. Instead, most of the claims about breast-feeding’s benefits lean on research conducted outside the lab: comparing one group of infants being breast-fed against another being breast-fed less, or not at all. Thousands of such studies have been published, linking breast-feeding with healthier, happier, smarter children. But they all share one glaring flaw.
An ideal study would randomly divide a group of mothers, tell one half to breast-feed and the other not to, and then measure the outcomes. But researchers cannot ethically tell mothers what to feed their babies. Instead they have to settle for “observational” studies. These simply look for differences in two populations, one breast-fed and one not. The problem is, breast-fed infants are typically brought up in very different families from those raised on the bottle. In the U.S., breast-feeding is on the rise—69 percent of mothers initiate the practice at the hospital, and 17 percent nurse exclusively for at least six months. But the numbers are much higher among women who are white, older, and educated; a woman who attended college, for instance, is roughly twice as likely to nurse for six months. Researchers try to factor out all these “confounding variables” that might affect the babies’ health and development. But they still can’t know if they’ve missed some critical factor. “Studies about the benefits of breast-feeding are extremely difficult and complex because of who breast-feeds and who doesn’t,” says Michael Kramer, a highly respected researcher at McGill University. “There have been claims that it prevents everything—cancer, diabetes. A reasonable person would be cautious about every new amazing discovery.”
Is breast-feeding superior to formula? Maybe at the margins, the way Betamax was superior to VHS. But this marginal difference isn’t worth haranguing mothers who are already stressed out by trying to manage this brand new creature that has erupted into the lives. And possibly with other kids already on the scene. And maybe with a job to go back to.
Moms already feel guilty enough. They don’t need the U.N. trying to body-shame them, too.
