In a message dated 8/12/99 9:06:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< Why doesn't the "myopic short view" see all the people's children who are
 CURRENTLY dying or struggling along doing poorly because they are formula
 fed??  WHY do they not count?  Someone PLEASE enlighten me.
  >>

OK, I am not in a position to dispense enlightenment -- I wish! :>.

But here's the thought experiment I personally do and balancing these risks.
It's a variation of the thought experiment Kathy did yesterday about the 1000
WIC babies.   Mine goes like this: I have two choices.

Choice One is that I have ten children of my own, and all of them suffer from
ear infections intermittently throughout their childhood, plus occasional
excema and other allergic symptoms.   Four also have some asthma, controlled
reasonably well with inhalators; and one of them has some more serious
illness -- let's say, diabetes.   They all survivie to adulthood, though, and
their average lifespan is 70 years.

Now choice two is that I have ten children, and nine are in the pink of
health and their collective average lifespan is 75 years.   But the tenth
child dies before her first birthday.

When I think of it that way, I, personally, pick the ear infections every
time.   All those illnesses, those "children struggling along poorly," are
certainly a factor, and I would never discount them.   But to me, they are
almost always going to be a lesser factor than deaths.  That's my prejudice
about my own beloved children _rahmanah leitsilan_, and so I try to apply it
to other people's children too.

(To continue the comparison from another post, I think a lot of mothers who
believe that fetal monitoring saves babies' lives are very content to risk
their own greater suffering in labor for a few hours to reduce the perceived
risk to their kids.   The suffering counts, but it looks small next to the
potential death.)

Obviously which way this calculus comes out depends in the end on the real
numbers.  There are very interesting posts in the archives about how many
kids in the US actually do die young as a result of formula feeding, though
of course the absolute numbers are unknowable; and the cutting-off-WIC idea
means playing with a bunch more imagined numbers:  how many babies would
still be formula fed without the giveaway, on the one hand, and on the other
how many would die of malnutrition etc.  I bet a lot of people would agree
with what, for short-hand, I want to call the KD position if they were
persuaded that their would be equal or more early childhood deaths; in the
USA though I think not so many if there were fewer deaths, even if there are
a lot of other, lesser, adverse effects.  Basically I guess I agree with
Kathy that the question is "how much suffering equals one death" -- but I
think the answer, for most Americans at least, is, really a whole lot.

Elisheva

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