Breast is best

We always encouraged our moms to breast feed, and one problem was when milk formula companies peddled their products to poor women.

But as the kids got older, the parents couldn't afford formula, so watered it down and the kids ended up malnourished and often vulnerable to die from infections.

So when I read the headlines claiming Trumpieboy opposed breast feeding, I thought "WTF?"

No, not because I suspected fake news (I am used to nuances being twisted by the MSM against Trumpieboy), but because public health docs have pushed to stop this for years at the local level.

So making it a UN resolution means lots of money for UN bureaucrats to push their weight around, but not much else.

and my other question was: This issue has been around for years (we opposed this in the early 1970s) so why did it come up now, at a time when people in third world countries are a lot richer, and there are a lot more women who need to work outside the home and use formula because they can't breastfeed?

This is what I found back in the 1970s: breastfeeding was universal in rural Zimbabwe, where babies often were not weaned until 2 years old, but in urban Liberia, the patients and nurses pointed out that these women needed to work and so needed formula to feed their babies.

Nowadays, here in the Philippines, they often breast feed for up to a year, but again often supplement the child's feeding with formula.

TV ads here for formula often only are about older kids, and do insist that breast feeding is better.

what has changed in the last 40 years is that people are now richer.

Yes, there are poor people, especially in war torn countries, but as a whole, there is a lot less poverty around.

And insisting on breast feeding until one year of age means women would not be able to hold a job outside the family. Back to the good old days!

Hmmm... this is the real "Handmaiden's tale".

The Federalist has the backstory and indeed it is "fake news".

“The Trump Administration believes it’s a public health priority that women and their families have all the information to decide how to appropriately deliver nutrition to their children, whether it is via breastfeeding or other methods,” an HHS spokesman said. The agency pointed out that the United States has a long history of supporting breastfeeding and breastfeeding programs, and is the largest bilateral donor of foreign assistance programs in this area. Exclusive breastfeeding rates have doubled across 20 of countries where these programs have focused between 1990 and 2014, they say. The U.S. also supports complementary feeding programs and accurate description of the same as a matter of long-standing policy. The original resolution would have made that policy goal difficult, officials said.