Baby Formula and Voluntary Fragility

Efficiency, convenience, and a doomed fight against natural law

Neanderthals who lives from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago could feed their babies, but modern Americans cannot. They call this “progress.” I call it insanity—a crisis created by efficiency, convenience, and a rejection of natural law.

Artistic representation of a Neanderthal couple that knew their purpose

Efficiency begets fragility. Fragile things die when everything doesn’t go exactly right. And modern life has made our very species incredibly fragile.

Baby formula is a perfect example. Baby formula does two things:

1. Replaces mother’s milk for women who cannot, for some reason, breastfeed.

2. Makes life more convenient for women with babies.

(I’m going to be brutally biological here, because emotion is the enemy of reason.)

Both purposes of baby formula increase fragility of the species.

The first reason—compensation for biological problems—increases the number of people who pass along a genetic propensity towards inability to breastfeed. 100,000 years ago, the offspring of early humans relied completely on their mothers’ milk for survival. Mothers who could not feed their children lost their children. By artificially compensating for the inability to breast feed, the percentage of women unable to breast feed naturally increased. Thus, the human race has a large number of women who cannot breastfeed.

The second reason for baby formula—convenience—is more a symptom of our innate laziness and desire for more. Biologically and anthropologically, humans are designed to remain in the close physical care of their mothers until their early teens. When women raised their children naturally, an individual mother was assisted by other mothers and women in the tribe. Men were out working and hunting and defending the tribe while women fed, raised, and nurtured the children. Frederick Douglas’s autobiographies provide a graphic view of how ancients raised children, and his close attachment to his grandmother demonstrates the powerful bonds such childrearing produces. (The severing of this bond also demonstrates better than perhaps any other event the horrors and cruelty of slavery.)

By delegating childrearing to hired hands and artificial formulae, the human species has made itself vulnerable to labor shortages and supply-chain disruptions. That’s why the current baby formula shortage represents a true existential threat to our nation. Not only has the desire for material goods reduced our fertility rate to less than replacement, it now threatens to exterminate the few babies we birth. We somehow forgot the reason we are here is to make more of us. Not more money, not more TikTok videos, not more luxurious vacations on super yachts—but more humans. Every facet of our anatomy and capabilities is ordered toward the propagation of our species. By rejecting natural law, we reject, not only God and nature, but ourselves.

The baby formula shortage should wake us up. Women should have babies and raise them. Men should do whatever is necessary for women to raise their offspring in the safest, most comfortable conditions consistent with preparing children for adulthood. And that preparation must begin with teaching children gender roles and life skills ordered toward the propagation of the species and the perpetuity of family lines. All for the greater glory of God who made us and ordained and ratified the natural law we cannot change even with hormone replacement, surgery, daycare centers, and formula.