The Mother’s Milk of Insanity
The Trump Administration has decided that breast feeding is not a good idea.
At the World Health Assembly, the United States upended a resolution simply stating that breastfeeding is best for both mom and baby.
American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
And when that didn’t pass, the United States of Damn America threatened countries.
The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
There were 12 witnesses to the threats by the United States.
I do not believe for one second that anyone in the Trump administration believes breastfeeding is bad. I think they believe that campaign donations from folks who make baby formula is better.
They picked on the poorest countries, of course, as bullies would do.
In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
Yeah, let’s have Russia be the good guys. That’s smart.
One must understand that in Trump’s world, tits are for another purpose entirely (and silicone ones are the very very best of all).
1Please, someone, Gorilla Glue some pacifiers into the bottle fed mouths of the Dotard45 maladministration. Just when we sane folks thought baby snatching and caging children was their ultimate step into inhumane, they’ve amped up their cruelty to include starving infants at the source of their only nutrition in early infancy.
From which idiot did this ‘thinking’ spring? Stephen Miller or John Bolton would lead my guesses, although John Kelly also has a record of cruelty over at Homeland Security.
2What fresh idiocy is this? I can’t. I just can’t. Some days, the soul-sucking stupidity of the Trump administration is beyond my ability to comment.
3So, the North Koreans complain that the US is bullying them, so the US decides to bully other countries just so they wouldn’t feel left out?
I guess we all knew that “Make America Great Again” was code for “Let’s be Ugly Americans Again.”
4Maybe this guy? Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar?
“The resolution as originally drafted placed unnecessary hurdles for mothers seeking to provide nutrition to their children,” an H.H.S. spokesman said in an email. “We recognize not all women are able to breast-feed for a variety of reasons. These women should have the choice and access to alternatives for the health of their babies, and not be stigmatized for the ways in which they are able to do so.” The spokesman asked to remain anonymous in order to speak more freely. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-opposition-to-breast-feeding-resolution-stuns-world-health-officials/ar-AAzJvKl?ocid=spartanntp
So many villains in the Dotard45 maladministration, we need a bigger wall chart to track them.
5Evidently the Evil Empire now running the country, including HHS, has decided that the Health part can’t be monetized into some sort of profit center where they get the profit. Breast feeding, being an amazingly cheap and very effective small-scale approach to caring for actually-born babies, is a losing proposition to them. Every time I think he can’t make me even more disgusted, he and his kleptocratic GOP colleagues find a new way to try to harm someone who’s not a rich old white male.
I’m appalled both professionally and personally. I’m a distinguished professor in public health, married to a highly published researcher in pediatrics with special interests in neonates. So we know the value of breast feeding through our research. And I was also a successful breast-feeding-only mom back when no one else in my cohort was doing this, thanks to support from my then mother-in-law. So I also know experientially that it takes some encouragement, and it pays off for baby and mother both.
You’d think people who harbor that much bigotry, greed, nastiness, and dishonesty would just swell up like puffball fungi and explode. Only of course we wouldn’t want their spores of evil to spread. Bad enough that Mango Mussolini has already spawned.
6One reason breast feeding is so important, especially in underdeveloped countries, is that clean water is often not available to mix with formula. Of course the benefits of mother’s
7milk are too numerous to mention, but #1 it’s available to mother’s and babies when needed. New moms need support to succeed, not more availability of commercial formula.
Does their greed know no end?
maryelle: Does their greed know no end?
Only if the length of the rope on the scaffolding is carefully measured.
81. We can’t make money off breastfeeding.
2. Our donors make money from selling formula.
3. That’s not what tits are for.
4. We haven’t gone far enough in our campaign to make America an international pariah.
5. We haven’t done anything jaw-droppingly stupid in at least 12 hours.
I’m reminded, as I too often am, of a scene in Robert Heinlein’s novel “Stranger in a Strange Land.” A human baby, only survivor of a crash, was raised by kind Martians who didn’t know anything about human culture. He is brought to Earth as a young man and has to learn how to be a human. One day he is taken to the zoo. In the monkey house, he sees a large monkey beat a smaller monkey and take his food. The small monkey runs over to an even smaller monkey and beats *him* up. The young man raised by Martians starts laughing so hard he collapses. His worried guide helps him get out in the fresh air. When the young man can finally speak, he says, “I understand humans now.”
9Rhea, is that a which came first the chicken or the egg parable? While it’s possible Donnie was raised by monkeys, he only learned to fling feces through his twitter feed and mouth. Or, maybe Maher had it correct regarding the male parental half of Donnie’s DNA being donated by an orangutan.
10Rhea:
11Thanks so much. I haven’t read Heinlein in decades, but that’s perfect.
Maryelle:
I had every intention of answering your question with a one word answer. No. And then Jane & PKM came along with an, actual working model 🙂
But seriously, this is just another example of what my lovely lady says, quoting her mother. Republicans’ concern for life begins at conception and ends at birth.
“We’re corrupt, through and through.”
12Will someone please sic the La Leche League on these people?
13Who the hell are they to tell mothers whether to nurse or bottle feed their babies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott
14@Rhea
+1 for Heinlein
+1 for Stranger
I treat Stranger with the same care as I treat my personal autographed copy of Q gospel.
15Yeah, I read about this elsewhere and the stream of profanities that flew from my mouth are simply not fit for publication. Suffice it to say, we have got to get those bastards in November.
16This is not the first time formula providers have played with lives. Several decades ago they donated formula to newly delivered women in Africa to ‘give the infants a good vitamin boost start in life’. They provided it free until the mothers’ milk dried up. Then they began charging. Desperate poor women scrambled to pay for the formula, diluted it to make it last longer, often with contaminated water, and babies died. And here we go again, with the greedy pals of our worse than worthless prez, taking advantage of those least able to survive it.
17The names of these despicable US representatives need to be published along with their photos at the WHO meeting. They deserve our scorn. They clearly have been bought by the manufacturers of baby formula.
Don’t let them hide. No peace in public or in quarters. Boycott manufacturers of baby formula and don’t buy their stock.
18@Karen,
See message #14. I included a link about the Nestle baby formula scandal of the 1970s.
19Whoops! First they screw this country in the back by colluding on a national election with the Russians which means they have certainly dishonored the flag. Now they are after motherhood? Who the hell wrote this script?
20At least here’s one thing – ONE THING – that does not remind me of The Handmaid’s Tale. Gilead is big on breastfeeding.
21Thanks Jane & PKM, I have just added HHH Secretary Azar to my call/email list which now includes Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill, Joe Donnelly, Lisa Murkowski, susan Collins and Conor Lamb. They must hear from all of us often to persuade them to vote against Dump’s Supreme court nominee,
22to reunite those migrant children ASAP and to protest the American greed voiced in the vote for commercial baby formula over what Nature intended.
Oops, forgot mealy-mouthed Doug Jones.
23@Maryelle:
I hope all these names are out on twitter.
24I cannot understand this at all. Every Doctor says and knows nursing babies is best, for babies and Mothers! Cheaper and easier. I should know I nursed my twins, because is was cheap and very easy. Full disclosure the third child was bottle fed, I was busier with three children. Let mothers decide what they want to do. Keep government out of this!
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