Savvy Vegetarian Blog

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Fri, 18 May 2007

Vegan Baby Death, Vegan Diet, Poverty, Ignorance and Punishment

Checking SV traffic, I noticed that vegan breastfeeding was suddenly a hot topic. I tracked this trend back to the recent vegan baby death story. The following is the text of my comment on a Gristmill post about the story.

It's all so tragic! The death of an innocent baby, the parent's poverty and ignorance, the extreme punishment given to them, the backlash against vegan diet. It's all mixed up and blamed on veganism, and vegan breastfeeding, which is almost beside the point.

I'm familiar with vegan diets, and hear from a lot of vegans or would be vegans (or their concerned parents), who are having trouble with their diets. I don't hear from the successful vegans, but I still have to conclude that nutritional ignorance is the main drawback to veganism, and is epidemic in the US regardless of dietary inclination. If most people who go vegan just drop all animal products, and start drinking soymilk, chances are good that they're malnourished by default.

However, in the case of this unfortunate vegan couple and their baby, a few facts seem to have gotten lost. The main one is that the baby doesn't appear to have been breastfed - the lack of support for breastfeeding in the US is a whole 'nother issue. If the mother was undernourished, breastfeeding may not have nourished the baby properly either, although it may have lived.

Another fact is that the baby was starved to death, a practice which isn't restricted to vegans. I don't know why they didn't give the baby formula - whether it was deliberate child neglect, or they couldn't afford it, or it didn't seem vegan to them, or they simply weren't competent to care for a baby. That's my suspicion.

The third fact is that the baby was born prematurely, at home, and didn't recieve the medical care that it needed.

The last fact is that our national dietary ignorance, poverty, and lack of social and medical support contributed to this infant death as much as anything the parents did or didn't do. Punishing them for being ignorant, stupid, vegan, and starving their baby doesn't fix anything.