good point. And crack babies, and AIDS babies can be thankful for formula now too.
For this reason alone formula is good.Third worlders should stay away from it. Even if the U.N. does send water for baby formula their is no guarantee that the people who need it will get it.
As I understand current national policies -- everywhere, politicians, pediatricians, state legislators endorse breastmilk as the best possible nutrition for infants.
In re UN policies, what do you think of this, put out by Independent Women's Forum
snips:
"In January, the [World Health Organization] recommended the adoption of an extreme anti-bottle-feeding resolution at the 57th World Health Assembly -- the WHO’s annual meeting, set for mid-May in Geneva. The immediate objective of the resolution is to force infant-formula packages to carry warning labels akin to those on cigarettes or liquor. The ultimate goal is to scare mothers into abandoning bottle-feeding."
The irony is that there’s no evidence whatsoever that infant formula is bad for babies. Its manufacturers are long-established companies like the Swiss firm Nestle, and millions of middle-class mothers in Europe and America who can’t breast-feed for one reason or other give their infants bottles of formula without the slightest ill effect. It is true that in many Third World countries, the water that must be mixed with the formula isn’t safe to drink without boiling first--but that’s a matter for public-health educators, not formula manufacturers.
As Glassman writes:
"There’s a correlation between high rates of infant-formula use and low rates of infant mortality. The reason is not that infant formula is better than breast milk, but that, as a country develops, infant health and nutrition improve, and the use of formula, at the same time, increases.
"Nestle sells more infant formula in a healthy nation like Belgium than it does in all of Africa, which has 60 times Belgium’s population. The best way to boost good health in Africa is to boost African economies. And time-saving technologies like infant formula can help.
"This means that Africans should be able to choose, and not to be scared or shamed into breast-feeding. Radicals and their supporters at the WHO, however, want to keep African women, in effect, barefoot, denying them the choice, as they modernize, of a healthy, convenient product."
The anti-bottle-feeding movement seems to have several impetuses. One is a strand of Third World romanticism prevalent among Westerners that idealizes primitive lifestyles--padding around barefoot in the rice paddy rather than commuting to an office park to sit in front of a computer all day.
Another is yuppie-mama faddism. Back in the 1930s, bottle-feeding babies was--believe it or not--a snooty upper-middle-class fad, eagerly embraced by college-educated women who could then look down on the breast-feeders as cows from the country who chewed tobacco and married their cousins. Now, the socioeconomic tables have turned: It’s upper-income moms who religiously nurse their babies (and take classes in and buy books about how to do so), while it’s working-class moms who don’t have time for that sort of thing and rely on formula to keep their infants fed. The elite types who want to outlaw bottle-feeding essentially want to push the folkways of upper-echelon parenting onto the rest of the world.
And don’t forget the anti-capitalist angle. Big companies manufacture infant formula--and we can’t have that.
---end snips
I know we are sending tons of AIDS money to Africa. I've dug and dug, but I don't think anyone knows for sure whether or not HIV can be passed through breast milk.
If children do not develop into good people,its because they do not stay on a moral path.
I agree with you.
Plenty of people reared on formula have turned out bad.
Is there a survey or statistical report you can point me to for this data? I find your postulation quite suspect.