http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=1&cset=true
Quote:
| To this day, the La Leche League, a leading breast-feeding organization, and other groups blame the formula makers for the 1.5 million non-breast-fed babies who die each year, ignoring the medical, cultural and economic circumstances that often doom infants. Big corporations make — horrors — profits on formula sales, so they must be duly demonized. At the prodding of the militants, the WHO now recommends that women nurse at least until the child is 2, which would be quite a cultural sea change unless you live in a hippie commune. Other proposals call for counseling, presumably at taxpayer expense, and new laws requiring employers to provide on-site nursing and breast-pumping facilities. A statement by La Leche League in May declared that breast-feeding "challenges the view of breasts as only sex objects." That's a long way from infants' health. Breast-feeding is a good thing. What is not good is to use government to terrorize women into abandoning a safe and nutritious substitute that millions of them have chosen for health or economic reasons. In sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita income is under $500 a year in many countries, where jobs, food and cash are matters of life and death for both sexes, and where HIV infection is rampant, it is quasi-criminal to ignore these problems in the name of ideology. Better to spend the money giving these countries the decent water supply that, more than anything else, would help the infant death rate fall. |
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