Timothy Birdnow

It was inevitable, I suppose; Time Magazine ran a cover with a breastfeeding mother of an older child, with an accompanying story about how we need a more touchy-feely approach to parenting (complete with kids snacking on mom's mammaries) and an article at Medical Press suggests the beginnings of a national campaign to have children dangling from mom's brastrings until puberty.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-masks-problem-kids-breast-fed.html

This article sings the praises of breast feeding, and yet one wonders why it should come to the fore now; is there some ulterior purpose served by a national campaign to promote keeping children on the tap longer?

According to the article:

"By 2020, the nation's health goals call for more than a quarter of babies to be exclusively breast-fed through their first six months of life, and for more than a third to still be nursing when they turn 1 year old.

To help reach those goals, the surgeon general last year issued a call to ease the obstacles that make it harder for women to breast-feed - from the hassles of pumping milk at work to a general lack of understanding about how super-healthy it is during that critical first year."

End excerpt.

So this reaches to the Surgeon General, meaning it is coming from the White House.

And, according to the article:

"The World Health Organization recommends continuing "along with appropriate complementary foods up to 2 years of age or beyond."

End excerpt.

Why? And why now?

Now, the obvious answer is that this is an attempt to make Americans feel more dependent. Children are weened at a young age because they need to start to develop a sense of their own identity, yet this will make them feel as if they are dependent on others longer. Would children breast fed into their twenties ever leave home? Will they move from Mommy's nipple to Uncle Sam's?

But there is more to this.  We have yet to penetrate to the core reason for this campaign.

One wonders; the government has sought to reform health care, making it a government-run system with an individual mandate forcing everyone to buy coverage. Will the new system mandate long-term breast feeding? Will it become compulsory?  This may seem a ridiculous idea now, but so too was the idea that you could be compelled to purchase a private product.  Michelle Obama has been aggressively pushing for government regulation of food. Perhaps we will all have to breast feed in the future?

America has certainly shown the capacity to remain in the cradle indefinitely. Perhaps we are all breast feeders now.