Ah, America! The land of the free and home to brave Republican politicians who want to force women to have children but don’t want to do anything to make sure those children have food. The United States is experiencing a shortage of infant formula (formula) nationally. The situation is tragic: in Tennessee two children ended up in hospital because their parents could not find the formula they needed. New York declared a state of emergency and the US military began airlifting supplies from Europe (they called it Operation fly formula).
Is the anti-abortion crowd doing everything possible to solve the problem? Not at all. Nearly 200 Republicans recently voted against a bill that would have provided $ 28 million in aid to the Food and Drug Administration to alleviate supply shortages. Nine Republicans also opposed a bill that allowed low-income parents to have easier access to infant formula thanks to a government program. All very typical, actually. “For life,” you remember, means being on the side of the unborn. And when they are born and begin to really need things, they are left alone. Roll up their dummies and go!
The scarcity of infant formula is not an unpleasant supply chain problem like many others. Babies cannot start eating solid foods until they are at least four months old; if there is no formula, you cannot give your child a bacon sandwich. Nor can you “just breastfeed” like this, overnight, as some have suggested. Bette Midler tweeted: “Try breastfeeding! It’s free and available when you need it ”. Eric Sammons, editor of the Catholic magazine Crisis, has tweeted: “I would say the hope is that this is an alarm bell that leads us to become more self-sufficient. God literally designed mothers to feed their babies ”.
An alarm bell
Sorry, god, but your project has some serious problems: I suggest you go back to the drawing board. Maybe you could add a little button to push when you want the milk to come out? This would be much easier than the current setup. Breastfeeding will also be “natural”, but for many women it is by no means easy. It’s not something we’re willing to talk about enough; indeed, prior to my personal foray into parenting I had absolutely no idea how long it takes and how difficult breastfeeding can be.
Among the many bigoted and uninformed nonsense, however, Sammons said one thing that is true. This crisis should indeed sound an alarm bell: we should all ask ourselves how the richest country in the world has found itself in this situation. While there are several factors involved, the simple answer to why there is a shortage of infant formula in the richest country in the world is the greed of large companies.
The United States loves to portray itself as a beacon of capitalism and the Republicans regularly scare away “socialist” Europe. In reality, free markets work much better in Europe; there is much healthier competition there than in the United States, where a few large companies make huge profits and everyone else pays the price. One thing that never ceases to amaze me, as a British living in the US, is for example how expensive and limited the broadband choices are here. To have internet at home, I can choose between only two options with an exaggerated price and essentially identical.
Other industries are plagued by similar problems, including infant formula: only two companies – Abbott and Reckitt Benckiser – control about 80 percent of the market in the United States. Nestlé has 10 percent. The lack of competition in the broadband markets is bad enough, because it means customers are being forced to pay absurd amounts. In the infant formula market, however, this means that when a company has production problems, babies risk starvation. So, yes, let’s make this a wake-up call. The operation to get the milk on the plane is just a poor band-aid. What we really need is an operation to repair capitalism.
(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)