C'mon NPR
by Kate Kahn - 10th June 2007
I love NPR…generally. But they let me down on Friday. A piece that aired on its Marketplace show was completely biased in the way it reported a story about the situation in New York.
The New York Public Health Department has decided to prohibt public hospitals from handing out bags with free products to new mothers when they leave the hospital. It's known as the Ban the Bag movement. The bags contain things like pacifiers, diapers and a little can of formula, and the people who want to stop hospitals from handing these out stipulate that the bags encourage new mothers to forget breastfeeding and just formula feed. Give us women more credit please! No woman I know decided to breast or bottle feed her child based on a bag of goodies handed out at the hospital. On top of that, I wonder why government should even have a say in this. But that’s really not the point I want to make today.
The point is NPR’s story. It described a situation with a woman who gave birth in a private hospital, so she was allowed to get a bag. She says she was given 16 bottles of formula in her bag. Hard to believe. Maybe, just maybe, if she had a premature baby, she might have gotten more than one can of formula. NPR didn’t tell us if her child was born a preemie. It’s possible, too, that the nurses just made a mistake. It’s common practice on the part of the formula companies to distribute one small can in each bag. Moreover, the reporter went onto discuss how breastfeeding rates diminish at the three-month mark, which, by implication, blames formula makers and the one little can that’s put in each bag. Did she think for a minute that the fact that breastfeeding rates go down after three months might be correlated to the fact that moms often return to work at that point?
In fact, a recent national survey, by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin & Associates, shows infant feeding decisions are based on a variety of personal, medical and logistical reasons. The results of their survey reveal that “after medical reasons, going back to work was given as the most important reason women would choose not to breastfeed, or not to continue breastfeeding. Among the major reasons for not breastfeeding, 86% said medical reasons, 62% said going back to work, 57% said problems with the baby latching on and 55% said baby not getting enough food.”
NPR can, and should, do a better job of putting stories in proper perspective.
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