The World Health Organization Discovers Breastfeeding
By Garrett Glass
Mar 24, 2004
 he World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations specialized agency for promoting world health, recently launched a plan to promote breastfeeding. Apparently the WHO has discovered that there are health benefits for infants that are breastfed. According to the UN press release, "Virtually all mothers can breastfeed provided they have accurate information, and support within their families and communities and from the health care system." The press release announces the 30-page presentation titled Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding, which was produced by the WHO.
Finally the WHO has determined through research and consultation with leading breastfeeding experts what billions of women through millennia of human existence have known all along, breastfeeding is good for your baby. There is no indication as to how much this groundbreaking global strategy costs, but it seems to be very professionally put together.
To illustrate the muddled thinking of this recommended policy framework, consider the following excerpt:
Inappropriate feeding practices and consequences are major obstacles to sustainable socioeconomic development and poverty reduction. Governments will be unsuccessful in their efforts to accelerate economic development in any significant long-term sense until optimal child growth and development, especially through appropriate feeding practices, is ensured.
Even if the children are fed and raised in a healthy environment, poor, illiberal economic policies will still ensure an impoverished and unhealthy future. In order to promote a healthy environment for children to be raised in, promoting sound, free-market economic reforms are the best defense against poverty and healthcare ills that accompany it. The WHO has this framework backwards.
According to the WHO, "children have the right to adequate nutrition and access to safe and nutritious food." Once again, the WHO has this backwards, a newborn infant is hardly in any position to understand what its rights are let alone assert them. The parents of the children have a responsibility and the right to feed their infant. This right is not granted by the state, it is a natural right. The state has a responsibility bestowed upon by its people to protect its right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Good health is certainly included in those rights.
The WHO's objective as stated in its founding constitution in 1948 is, "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health." As defined by the WHO, health is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease of infirmity." Those are lofty yet unattainable goals for any state or government organization. People are responsible for their own health and the health of their children. The only responsibility a government or organization such as the UN can assume is the responsibility to ensure and protect the rights of the people to pursue health. The best environment to pursue health is an environment that protects economic freedom so that everyone has the ability and opportunity to pursue health in their own fashion.
Women have known for thousands of years that breastfeeding is the healthiest way to feed their newborn infants, they didn't need the WHO reaffirm what even a field mouse knows by instinct. Along with the WHO's crusade against tobacco and promoting seat belt use, this is another of their wasteful and unnecessary programs. The WHO estimates that 800,000 children die every year from measles, perhaps the funds for the fountain in front of their new $66,000,000 headquarters building could save a few children.
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