Mary Cassatt, “Louise Nursing Her Child”
Wednesday
I turned to William Blake when the Trump administration enacted its deliberately cruel strategy of separating children from their parents as a way to deter them crossing the border. I turn to the poet again following the administration’s attempts to sabotage international efforts to encourage breast-feeding. When one adds to these its attempts to cut food stamp allocations and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), one can only conclude that it is conducting a war on poor children.
The New York Times reports on it breast-feeding stance. After the World Health Organization was prepared to sponsor a resolution advocating the practice,
the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
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.
When these preliminary efforts didn’t pay off, America started playing hardball:
When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
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.
Johns Hopkins pediatrician Frank Oski has one of the most powerful statements on the benefits of breast-feeding:
Imagine that the world had created a new ‘dream product’ to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it.
By contrast, baby formula not only costs money, but in poorer countries mothers may use polluted water, increasing infant mortality. Not that the Trump administration cares as it goes out of its way to create Blake’s “dangerous world”:
My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
“Sulk” in an interesting word. The child, who should be an angel entering joyfully into the world, finds himself instead a defensive fiend and sulkily retreats. Only now there are forces actively working against even this final place of retreat. Blake himself may not have seen that one coming.
Further thought: So as not to end today’s post on an entirely bleak note, here’s a Carl Sandburg poem on the importance of mother nurturing (from “Poems on a Late Night Car”):
Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.