Since I started this blog, I have been heavily in favor of WIC initiatives to get more poor moms breastfeeding. In fact, I’ve reported several instances where some of these new initiatives are actually working, and even an instance where it’s working so well black children are getting rickets since breast milk contains no vitamin D. It is with the below information, however, that makes me angry at how wrong I’ve been all along.

Chris Edwards, a CATO Institute scholar and top expert on federal and state/local tax and budget issues, blogged about a recent article in the International Journal of Breastfeeding: WIC’s promotion of infant formula in the United States by University of Hawaii professor, George Kent which I also read.

Truly, I’ve never been one to know how WIC works and I certainly never understood the close ties between WIC and the three largest infant formula companies: Mead Johonson, Ross Laboratories, and Carnation. I’ve now learned that:

1. In 2005, only .6% of the federal WIC budget was set aside for breastfeeding promotion at $34 million. (That sounds like a lot, but not when the total budget is 5 billion dollars.).
2. In fact, the total numbers of WIC mothers who breastfeed have gone up, but so too have the numbers for non-WIC mothers.
3. In 2001, WIC received 1.4 billion dollars in rebates from the infant formula companies, which allowed 2 million more recipients of WIC to be served.
4. WIC supplies about half of all infant formula in the United States.

What this says to me: The federal government has little interest in seriously promoting breastfeeding to poor and minority moms because it simply does not bode well for its bottom line. In effect, by WIC supporting, in large part, formula-feeding, doling out free formula vouchers and receiving rebates from formula companies in return, they are supporting, even encouraging, the inferior health of minority and poor infants and women. Even though, on paper, WIC encourages and “adheres” to the American Academy of Pediatrics ‘ Policy Statement on “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk” (2005), their actions, as stated in Kent’s article, overwhelmingly prove otherwise.