New York City Instructs Hospitals To Hide The Baby Formula

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Written By:
Rob Port

Jul 29, 2012
12:00pm

Not even the issue of breastfeeding is safe from intrusion by the long, pointy nose of big government. In the City of New York, hospitals will be making it difficult for mothers of newborns to get access to baby formula in the hospital.

Government bureaucrats know better than moms:

Mayor Bloomberg is pushing hospitals to hide their baby formula behind locked doors so more new mothers will breast-feed.
Starting Sept. 3, the city will keep tabs on the number of bottles that participating hospitals stock and use — the most restrictive pro-breast-milk program in the nation.

Under the city Health Department’s voluntary Latch On NYC initiative, 27 of the city’s 40 hospitals have also agreed to give up swag bags sporting formula-company logos, toss out formula-branded tchotchkes like lanyards and mugs, and document a medical reason for every bottle that a newborn receives.

While breast-feeding activists applaud the move, bottle-feeding moms are bristling at the latest lactation lecture.

“If they put pressure on me, I would get annoyed,” said Lynn Sidnam, a Staten Island mother of two formula-fed girls, ages 4 months and 9 years. “It’s for me to choose.”

So much for the government not getting between patients and their doctors. So much for the government supporting a patient’s right to choose.

And as Obamacare ushers in a new age of government control over our health care – with bureaucrats shaping the insurance plans we’re allowed to access and those plans, in turn, shaping our health care – this sort of thing is only going to get worse.