Welcome back to another week of KK&F. The latest news cycle has inundated us with attacks on reproductive health, capitalism’s failure to provide for us, and the cruelty of means-testing in a system of forced scarcity. But all of these stories, from the impending fall of Roe v. Wade to the shortage of baby formula hitting 40 percent of U.S. stores, ask us to think more broadly about how our country punishes parents and children — and how hollow pro-life rhetoric really is.
While celebrities like Bette Midler jumped online to harangue parents frantically searching for increasingly scarce baby formula earlier this month, don’t get it twisted: everyday families are the last people who deserve blame for this scare. Federal regulators took months to respond to a formula contamination crisis after they were informed about it last year. Wine cave denizen and current transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg tossed in his two cents after he was asked to weigh in on the Biden administration’s failure to act: “The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make formula.”
Thanks, Pete. Should they? Should government officials take anything away from the sight of formula canisters locked up in grocery stores, a clear sign of how desperate American families are to give their children basic nutrients? Formula-feeding babies are already singled out for lesser nutrition benefits under WIC. These systems, which politicians refer to as “incentives” for parents to provide better nutrition for their children, are hardly incentivizing as much as they are frightening and disciplinary, intended to scare working-class people into reaching toward resources that are too scarce and too expensive. It’s an impossible situation, and parents are getting squeezed harder and harder with total system failures like the formula shortage.
We’ll be covering a range of current events on this week’s episode of KK&F with our special guest, and we hope you’ll join us. Paying subscribers can watch the video conversation through Substack on Friday, and the podcast will be available to everyone Saturday through streaming platforms like Pandora, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more.