(
)
This is just creepy.
Acting more like a competitive Park Slope uber parent than the leader of New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has waded with both left feet smack into the middle of the Mommy Wars.
The 70-year-old mayor, who as far as I know has never latched an infant onto his bare chest, is waging war not on sugar, fat, cigarettes or soda. Bloomberg is scolding and harassing vulnerable new mommies on how they should feed their kids.
The war on women is complete.
Bloomberg’s latest Nanny State initiative is called “Latch On NYC’’ — a program destined to create shame, fear and anxiety among the people who reproduce. The mayor is not simply telling adults what to eat, drink and breathe. He’s virtually requiring new moms to nurse their newborns or risk social and cultural condemnation, not to mention hard-core bullying from City Hall.
Presumably, that is, if a mom’s breasts contain less than 16 ounces of milk.
Starting next month, the city is enacting the most punishing pro-breast-feeding program in the nation, if not the world. City health goons are not just suggesting that “breast is best.’’ They’re practically accusing new moms of child abuse if they don’t comply.
Here’s how it works: Captive audiences of postpartum moms in city hospitals will be pressured to breast-feed. Those who resist, due to their unwillingness or inability to nurse — or the financial necessity of returning quickly to work — must beg for formula.
Not so fast.
Before women get their hands on a lousy bottle, they must submit to an interrogation. Lecturing lacto-nuts want to know — why are you such a selfish, negligent idiot?
It gets worse.
The hospital will keep records on every bottle it dares deliver to a new mom — and provide a medical reason why. There’s no promise of privacy for those who don’t toe the breast-feeding line.
After all this, if the mother summons the strength to insist on formula, the poison must be checked out from under lock and key, like a narcotic.
Twenty-seven out of 40 city hospitals have agreed to stop handing moms money-saving swag bags of free formula.
In the Nazification of nursing, resistance is futile.
Then a funny thing happened. The bottle-feeding Mommy Underground is starting to peek its shamed head from the foxhole.
The Latch On NYC program “is awful!’’ whispered a friend, a single mom who confessed she stopped nursing after returning to work. “It should be a woman’s choice.’’
“The real reason why the Gotham policy is so objectionable,’’ wrote Gayle Tzemach Lemmon in The Atlantic, “is it infantilizes women by telling them they are no longer adult enough to decide for themselves what is best for their families and themselves.’’
According to Bloomberg, once you have a baby you turn into one.
For more than a decade, nursing has been pushed on moms — ironically, by other moms — as not just healthy, but close to godly. A friend, Nicole, was sitting in a park, bottle-feeding her child, when a strange woman demanded to know if she breast-fed. Startled, she said, “No.’’
The conversation ended as the prying mom marched off in a huff.
Finding support for bottle-feeding parents — including those who adopt, widowed dads and gay male couples — is like finding size 0 at JCPenney. I found the rare 1995 manifesto “Bottle Feeding Without Guilt’’ (renamed “When Breast-feeding is Not an Option’’), whose author, Peggy Robin, coined the term “breast-feeding cultism.’’
Robin was roundly accused, by moms, of being in the pocket of formula companies.
Never mind that formula has been improved to the point where it’s close to breast milk. Advocates insist that nursing makes your baby quicker, stronger, and wards off everything from ear infections to cancer.
“The IQs of breast-fed babies are 1 to 2 points higher!’’ a breast cultist at Metropolitan Hospital told me. But when I asked the lacto-nut what percentage of kids are geniuses or can run the three-minute mile — questions you’d ask of any miracle cure — she fell silent.
I’ve concluded that these “scientific’’ results were cooked up to make women suicidal.
Don’t give in to the health police. Feed your baby any way that’s right for you.
Mayor Bloomberg, keep your hands off.
Rotten baby-napper can’t pay back the stolen years
They’ll never get the time back.
As an infant in 1987, Carlina White was snatched from Harlem Hospital by Ann Pettway, who posed as a nurse. Pettway spent the next two decades raising the girl as her own. Then Carlina grew suspicious and tracked down her real mom, Joy White, who never gave up hope of seeing her daughter alive. The reunion is marred by pain.
Pettway, 50, was sentenced this week to 12 years for the kidnapping. Joy White and Carlina’s dad, Carl Tyson, are struggling to form relationships with their grown daughter, who is 24 and a mom herself.
Pettway will never pay for her crime in full.
What do frisk foes say now?
As 4-year-old Lloyd Morgan Jr. was laid to rest in The Bronx, the victim of random gunfire, carnage in the city continues apace. Last weekend, six people were shot, including a 13-year-old boy hit in the hand in a drive-by Brooklyn shooting. And a girl of 2 — 2! — was shot in the leg.
Meanwhile, enemies of law and order fight the effective police practice of stop-and-frisk, which removes deadly guns from the hands of bad guys. When will it end?
The bloodshed won’t slow until a bullet is pumped into someone beloved by a judge or an activist fond of fighting stop-and-frisk. How many more have to die?
Gov sticks it to the kid piercers
Gov. Cuomo this week signed a law requiring kids under 18 to receive a parent’s permission before having their tongues, navels and other body parts pierced. As I reported in April, St. Marks Place in the East Village, better known as the piercing capital of North America, played host to kids of 12 who got sliced and diced without parental say-so.
Body piercing carries a 20 percent risk of infection, and can cause hepatitis, said the gov. In New York, you must be 18 to get a tattoo, and underage kids can’t enter a tanning salon without Mom’s OK.
Sorry kids, but your skin will thank me.
Tell Taylor
Songbird Taylor Swift, 22, canoodled in Hyannis Port last weekend with Conor Kennedy, 18, the son of RFK Jr. and the late Mary Richardson Kennedy. His grandma Ethel, a huge Swiftie, hooked them up.
Taylor also went slumming last month with Patrick Schwarzenegger, 18, son of JFK/RFK niece Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
At least Swift’s lads are not old enough to drink. But I’d advise Taylor against riding in motor vehicles with members of this clan.