YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS UP – AT 10:26 A.M. ET:  This is going viral across the internet.  You talk about a nanny state?  This is what it's about.  From the New York Post:

The nanny state is going after 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.”

Under Latch On NYC, new mothers who want formula won’t be denied it, but hospitals will keep infant formula in out-of-the-way secure storerooms or in locked boxes like those used to dispense and track medications.

COMMENT:  Who gave the city the right to do this?  I agree with Lynn Sidnam.  It's her right to choose.  She's the mother.  Mike Bloomberg has never been a mother, and all his billions cannot buy that honor.  This is the nanny state pushed to ridiculous extremes, and both mothers and pediatricians should rise up and oppose it.

New York is highly influential in social policy.  Indeed, virtually the entire mechanism that Ronald Reagan called the American safety net has its origins in New York.  So what happens in New York City can have national implications.  This new initiative is disturbing in a nation battling to save its freedoms from those who consider themselves our betters.  Stop it now.

July 29, 2012