What is fascinating to me is to go to any website where this story is 
reported and read the public postings. IMO, they are far more 
informative than anything we could possibly have to say. There is 
incredible anger that becomes directed racially or socially, towards 
teens or immingrants. There is a strong desire to blame individuals for 
the numbers being driven upwards, but there is precious little ability 
to see the bigger picture. There is little or no understanding of the 
political or public policy implications and very little backlash at the 
medical model of care. Certainly, you could assume that many people who 
spend time posting on such boards are the least educated or aware, but 
I think it is dangerous to be so dismissive. We are such a 
contradiction--we desire to be individuals and see the responsibility 
as lying with the individual--but always the "other" individual. It 
reminds me of the research that shows that people are easily able to 
recognize someone who is obese, unless the person is him(her)self.

When you read the extremes of explanations (poverty, multi-culturalism, 
teens, accuracy of reporting, poor access to healthcare, poor access to 
birth control, high undocumented immigrant population), you can see 
validity in most and major deficits in all of them. It is when you look 
at the individual families, I think, that you really come to understand 
how our poor outcomes as a nation reflect on our values and our ability 
to be self-reflective in a very deep way. I believe that these numbers 
will never change in this country and may indeed get much worse if we 
continue to push for heroism in saving babies' lives (their 
psycho-spiritual beings always risked, if even aknowledged at all) 
rather than addressing the big picture. So long as human beings are 
objects of conception to be rescued from the dangerous bodies of their 
mothers, so long as the psycho-spiritual life of the famiiy is so 
insignificant, so long as preventive health care means taking synthetic 
vitamins, so long as our understanding of nutrition is framed in the 
"food pyramid", so long as we are a nation wounded by the history we 
have now created through generations of artificial living, so long as 
health care remains in the domain of the medical system rather than the 
family system and limits itself to physical survival, we are going to 
continue to reap the outcomes of these poorly thought-out choices.

I become so frustrated when the opinions of the very same people who 
participate in the system that perpetuates this outcome are called upon 
to explain it to the public. These are the very same people invested in 
covering up the real cause lest anger be directed at them. These are 
the very same people who resist, restrict and even punish dialogue. I 
personally have no desire to hear one more word from the public health 
officials or politicians who seek to imprison midwives for attending 
homebirths or to punish holistic practitioners who treat people as 
whole beings or silence the researchers who are trying desperately to 
publish and educate about maternal and infant psychology or restrict 
access to any care other than the medical model, especially for 
pregnancy, childbirth and pediatrics. The more truly educated and 
self-responsible you are in the US, the more of a risk you are to the 
system that is seeking so desperately to sustain itself on the house of 
cards it has built. It is not a right for a human infants to be 
breastfed, but it is a "right" to have access to subsidized AIM. I mean 
this--it is a "right" to be given AIM samples, according to the 
governor of the state of Massachusetts, but it is not a right to take 
care of your own body and birth your baby as you were designed. I don't 
know--I have to wonder what would anyone expect in a country that 
imprisons midwives, but advcoates for a woman's "right" to have her 
formula gift bags?
Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA

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