A con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist writes at Town­hall: Bloomberg to New Moth­ers: You Real­ly Should Be Breast­feed­ing, You Know:

Appar­ent­ly, car­ry­ing a baby for nine months just isn’t hard enough. Don’t you think new moth­ers deserve a lec­ture about how to feed their baby.….just hours after they endure hard labor and are still in the hos­pi­tal? New York City May­or Mike Bloomberg has moved from his sug­ary drink ban onto the breasts of new moth­ers. That’s right, Michael Nan­ny Bloomberg is now ask­ing hos­pi­tals to lock up and strict­ly reg­u­late baby for­mu­la. He wants nurs­es and doc­tors to give moth­ers who ask for for­mu­la as an alter­na­tive to breast­feed­ing a “talk­ing to” about how breast­feed­ing is bet­ter for their baby.

Con­ser­v­a­tive web­site The Blaze joins in:

May­or Bloomberg…has gone a step beyond ban­ning sug­ary sodas and trans fats…. Now, it seems he is also try­ing to reg­u­late breast milk.

…Bloomberg is actu­al­ly push­ing hos­pi­tals to keep their baby for­mu­las “behind locked doors” so that new moth­ers will be more like­ly to breastfeed.

The con­ser­v­a­tive Project 21 puts for­ward a moth­er who objects:

May­or Bloomberg’s lat­est, his Baby-Friend­ly Hos­pi­tal Ini­tia­tive, is part of Bloomberg’s mode of reduc­ing choice for New York­ers and con­tin­u­ing to chip away at the free market.

Accord­ing to a CBS report, the ini­tia­tive will help hos­pi­tals edu­cate moth­ers on the ben­e­fits of breast­feed­ing over baby for­mu­la. The pro­gram is also spon­sored by the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion which rec­om­mends that moth­ers breast­feed for six months.

As a moth­er who breast­fed her chil­dren for an extend­ed peri­od of time, I com­plete­ly sup­port breast­feed­ing our babies; how­ev­er, that is entire­ly a moth­er’s choice and one which should be made in coop­er­a­tion with the baby’s pedi­a­tri­cian and her own physician.

May­or Bloomberg is now play­ing the role of pedi­a­tri­cian and neo-natal spe­cial­ist. While it is great to encour­age breast­feed­ing, the real­i­ty is that some women may not want to breast­feed their baby and is sim­ply their choice. The gov­ern­ment should not force them to do it.

And so forth.

Mean­while, the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pedi­atrics rec­om­mends that all babies be fed exclu­sive­ly on breast milk for the first 6 months, and com­ple­men­tary breast­feed­ing and sol­id foods for the next 6 months or more. The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion rec­om­mends breast­feed­ing for the first 2 years.  “Infant feed­ing,” the AAP explains, should not be con­sid­ered as a lifestyle choice but rather as a basic health issue.” 

The AAP feels so strong­ly about the mat­ter that they urge physi­cians not to give pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al about for­mu­la to preg­nant women.  The Sur­geon Gen­er­al has also weighed in strong­ly in favor of breast­feed­ing, and against allow­ing direct mar­ket­ing of for­mu­la to new moth­ers.  The Sur­geon Gen­er­al, build­ing on a code of behav­ior agreed to by the for­mu­la indus­try, observes, “Dis­plays of posters, prod­ucts, or dec­o­ra­tions from these com­pa­nies in a health care professional’s office or in a hos­pi­tal or clin­ic leave the impres­sion that clin­i­cians favor for­mu­la feed­ing over breast­feed­ing. Giv­en the health con­se­quences of not breast­feed­ing, clin­i­cians should not implic­it­ly pro­mote infant for­mu­la by pro­vid­ing venues for its advertisement.”

Bloomberg’s pol­i­cy sim­ply fol­lows the rec­om­men­da­tions of the AAP, the Sur­geon Gen­er­al, and oth­er pub­lic health and par­ent­ing experts.

On the oth­er hand, con­ser­v­a­tives are cel­e­brat­ing a court’s rul­ing in favor of a law in South Dako­ta requir­ing that women seek­ing an abor­tion be told that abor­tion rais­es the risk of sui­cide – a claim which is fac­tu­al­ly false.

At the con­ser­v­a­tive New Repub­lic, this is cel­e­brat­ed as “good news”:

The South Dako­ta informed-con­sent law is the first to require that women receive infor­ma­tion about a greater risk of sui­cide. The effec­tive­ness of this law remains to be seen. The lat­est research on informed-con­sent laws shows the most effec­tive laws appear to be those that raise the costs of the abor­tion — by requir­ing two sep­a­rate vis­its to the abor­tion clin­ic. That hav­ing been said, the fact that the Eighth Cir­cuit Court of Appeals upheld the South Dako­ta law is evi­dence of the good work pro-lif­ers have done over the past sev­er­al years doc­u­ment­ing the health risks of abortion.

At Town­hall, we’re told:

South Dako­ta is doing every­thing it can to let down­trod­den preg­nant women know there are bet­ter, health­i­er options than abortion.…

What South Dako­ta law­mak­ers under­stand is that a woman who choos­es to have an abor­tion needs to be aware of the incred­i­bly grave con­se­quences asso­ci­at­ed with that decision.

And yet this pol­i­cy, which inserts the state between a doc­tor and a patient, requir­ing doc­tors to say things that aren’t true in hopes of dis­suad­ing women from hav­ing a legal med­ical pro­ce­dure. The wide­ly-respect­ed Guttmach­er Insti­tute explains:

The court deci­sion on the South Dako­ta law requir­ing that women be informed of their increased sui­cide risk should they obtain an abor­tion is con­tra­dict­ed by the over­whelm­ing weight of the high­est qual­i­ty sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence available:

• In Decem­ber 2011, a sys­tem­at­ic review com­mis­sioned and pub­lished by the Acad­e­my of Med­ical Roy­al Col­leges (fund­ed by the UK Depart­ment of Health, and car­ried out by the Nation­al Col­lab­o­rat­ing Cen­tre for Men­tal Health at the Roy­al Col­lege of Psy­chi­a­trists) con­clud­ed that “rates of men­tal health prob­lems for women with an unwant­ed preg­nan­cy were the same whether they had an abor­tion or gave birth,” that an “unwant­ed preg­nan­cy was asso­ci­at­ed with an increased risk of men­tal health prob­lems” and that the “most reli­able pre­dic­tor of post-abor­tion men­tal health prob­lems was hav­ing a his­to­ry of men­tal health prob­lems before the abortion.”
• An August 2008 report by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion (APA) Task Force on Men­tal Health and Abor­tion con­clud­ed that “the best sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence indi­cates that the rel­a­tive risk of men­tal health prob­lems among adult women who have an unplanned preg­nan­cy is no greater if they have an elec­tive first-trimester abor­tion than if they deliv­er the pregnancy.”
• A com­pre­hen­sive review of the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, con­duct­ed in 2008 by researchers at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty, like­wise found that “the high­est-qual­i­ty research avail­able does not sup­port the hypoth­e­sis that abor­tion leads to long-term men­tal health prob­lems.” The Johns Hop­kins review also found a “clear trend” by which “the high­est qual­i­ty stud­ies had find­ings that were most­ly neu­tral, sug­gest­ing few, if any, dif­fer­ences between women who had abor­tions and their respec­tive com­par­i­son groups in terms of men­tal health seque­lae. Con­verse­ly, stud­ies with the most flawed method­ol­o­gy found neg­a­tive men­tal health seque­lae of abortion.”

…

Laws such as South Dako­ta’s, which are ground­ed in spu­ri­ous research rather than the best-avail­able sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence, not only rep­re­sent a gross intru­sion into the doc­tor-patient rela­tion­ship, they also endan­ger the health and rights of women, by inten­tion­al­ly mis­in­form­ing them on impor­tant med­ical mat­ters. It is high­ly unfor­tu­nate that, even when wide­ly rec­og­nized as such with­in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, dis­cred­it­ed stud­ies can have far-reach­ing consequences.

And, of course, they make hyp­ocrites of con­ser­v­a­tives.  Appar­ent­ly it’s OK to pass laws requir­ing doc­tors to mis­in­form patients and to reduce the qual­i­ty of the health care they pro­vide, but not to enact poli­cies mak­ing it eas­i­er for doc­tors to encour­age new moth­ers to adopt prac­tices which have been shown to sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve their own health and the health of new babies.