Areas of Moral Clarity
Last year I made two posts about Tracy Kidder's book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, which have both been very high in my blog stats. The first was this brief entry back in June which included a link to the questions in the essay contest about Tracy Kidder's book. The second was this entry with context on Case's Common Reading Program, made in early August.
However, I never actually returned to the questions in the essay contest. They are wonderfully rich questions, though, like this one: When you look at situations in the world, do you see mostly areas of moral ambiguity or of moral clarity? Take an issue that matters deeply to you, and identify the major obstacles to resolving it? Does the main difficulty lie in determining what "ought to be done," or does it lie in "the doing?"
Any human being who suffers from disease deserves high-quality treatment, regardless of whether the individual can afford to pay for that treatment or not. This is Paul Farmer's area of moral clarity, and I stand with him in his assertion that any human being deserves health care. On this basis, he has motivated himself and a large team to deliver treatment for Tuberculosis, HIV, and other medical conditions in Haiti, Russia, Africa, and other areas beseiged by poverty. Farmer's work with Partners in Health offers powerful evidence that disease and the suffering that comes with it can be effectively treated.
My assertion is that health education for preventive care is as much a moral imperative as is free treatment of disease in poor communities.
My focus over the past several years has been on a particular type of preventive care, which is the birthright of each human infant: breastfeeding. Supporting new mothers in learning to breastfeed their babies is powerful preventive medicine, and yet most of our hospitals have ceded the moral high ground, permitting formula manufacturers to provide free samples in their newborn nurseries. It astonishes me that such wide sectors of global society have come to accept infant formula as a valid alternative choice.
The NEOBEAN project affirms the wisdom and imperative for our community to come together to support all mothers who can do so in exclusively breastfeeding their infants. Implicitly, the project asserts that it is wrong to continue to frame breastfeeding and formula feeding as equivalent choices. It also suggests that as a society, we need to do all that we can to make breastfeeding easy for mothers. In particular, we must reexamine our willingness to condone the marketing of infant formula to pregnant women and new mothers.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that every mother who feeds her child infant formula has engaged in an immmoral act. In some cases, the use of formula can be a lifesaving act, and no one should feel that feeding an infant is a bad thing. It's just that sometimes, we feed infants to make ourselves feel less anxious, rather than because they are actually in need of nutrition.
As I have suggested in an essay at NEOBEAN's website, much of mothers' guilt about using formula is created by the misinformation which surrounds pregnant mothers in our society. Their anger with themselves for choosing formula is misdirected, and should instead be redirected at the sources of that misinformation.
My colleague Mano Singham notes that the book is intimidating in the way that many biographies are... it highlights Paul Farmer's exceptional accomplishments, and may make those of us who have not accomplished as much in the first three decades of our lives feel inadequate, rather than inspired. Still, I think this notion of areas of moral clarity is something that even the least accomplished can take heart in.
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