The latest from New York’s commissioner of mental hygiene is that maternity wards in New York are going to start locking up their baby formula so as to force new mothers to breast feed their children. This scheme, according to the report in the New York Post, will start in 27 of the city’s 40 hospitals September 3. It’s part of the so-called “Latch on NYC” initiative the mental hygiene commissioner sprung on the city in May. The idea seems to be that New Yorkers elected the mayor to station the commissioner, Dr. Thos. Farley, between each newborn and his mother to make sure she doesn’t use her own best judgment in making her choice of how to feed her baby. Of course, if her choice had been that she’d wanted to abort the baby, the mayor would have hustled Dr. Farley out of the way faster than you could say Margaret Sanger.

When leading clergymen — Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish — called a press conference a year and a half ago to raise an alarm that 41% of the pregnancies in New York that weren’t ended by miscarriages were ended by abortion, the mayor and the commissioner of mental hygiene were as quiet as a . . . well, tomb. But let some poor mother reach for the formula samples hospitals and manufacturers heretofore have made available, they go into a panic. So weird is the Latch on NYC program that, when it was announced in May, even the New York Times went after it. The Times issued a piece by Jennifer Zajfe called “Formula, for Disaster.” “Bottle-feeding versus breast-feeding is a personal choice, and the implication that distributing free formula samples promotes ‘laziness’ in new moms is ridiculous,” she wrote.

Our purpose here is not to quibble one way or another with which is the healthier way to start a baby’s nutrition. We’re disinclined to think it’s any of the government’s business. But if it is the government’s business, how in the world do these rules get made? The health and mental hygiene department says that the whole scheme is voluntary. That’s what Dr. Farley’s equally radical predecessor said when he tried to get restaurants to cook French fries in a lower quality oil without trans fats. When the restaurants tried to stick with the higher quality oils containing trans fats — they made better fries — he turned around and used the force of law to ban trans fats. This is clearly what is going to happen to the hapless hospitals if too many mothers decide the best thing is to exercise their right under Latch on NYC to demand formula.

Our own view is that if the state is going to step into these kinds of intimate matters, New Yorkers deserve to have the rules made by the legislature, where they get a say in who makes the rules, can appear at hearings, and benefit from at least a degree of transparency. Not that either the City Council or the legislature in Albany has set any great standard. But what a situation the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has gotten itself into when its rule-making is seen as more high-handed, less transparent, more dictatorial — and more laughable — than anything Albany of the City Council has tried. Eventually, when the city is no longer overseen by a billionaire invested in the ideology of state control through public health, New Yorkers can hope for a chance at a return to reasonableness and leave the mothering to mothers.