Another weird right wing obsession

That would be raw milk.  No, I really don't understand that. Here are the TRUE FACTS.

Pediatrician Perri Klass has pointed out that we have no specific word for the parent of a dead child, comparable to widow or orphan.(2) She speculates that is because it was formerly so commonplace it didn’t need a designation.

Of course people grieved for their dead children, but it wasn’t usually the life-altering tragedy we consider it to be today. It couldn’t have been, or society could not have functioned. Klass provides a list of presidents from Washington to Lincoln, who had children, and every one of them had at least one child die. Even as late as 1900, something like 1/5 to ¼ of children died. Life expectancy at birth in the U.S. in 1900 was about 47 years. Today it's about 79 years. Life expectancy increased at all ages in the 20th Century, but the drastic decline in infant and child mortality made the biggest difference in life expectancy at birth.

Two of the leading causes of death in 1900, gastrointestinal infections and tuberculosis, were major killers of children, and a major underlying cause of these deaths was cow’s milk. The U.S. population originally was predominantly rural, but by 1900 the majority of the population in the northeast lived in cities, and by 1910 the same was true in the west and Midwest. Cow’s milk had to come into cities like New York from farms tens of miles away, at a time when there was no refrigeration. The milk was often contaminated with pathogens that killed the children who drank it. 

Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization in 1865, but even 25 years later milk was not normally pasteurized. Then a German immigrant in New York City, a wealthy merchant named Nathan Strauss, learned about pasteurization. In 1892 he used his own money to establish a pasteurization plant in Manhattan’s East Village, and in 1893 he established “milk depots” in low income neighborhoods to sell pasteurized milk below cost. He also established a second plant to provide pasteurized milk to an orphanage on Randall’s Island, where the mortality rate was something like 15% a year. The death rate immediately dropped substantially.

Strauss’s efforts attracted the attention of scientists and physicians, and incited a campaign to outlaw the sale of unpasteurized milk. This came to the attention of president Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1907 appointed a commission to study the matter. The report came back the following year with the conclusion that pasteurization would save many lives.

As might not surprise you given the reaction to public health mandates more recently, the campaign to mandate pasteurization provoked a furious backlash, including from most milk producers. Why they thought it was good business to kill their customers I cannot say. Many in the general public also opposed the ban on raw milk, claiming that pasteurization negatively affected nutrition and taste. (It doesn’t.) Nevertheless Chicago did ban the sale of raw milk in 1909. New York got around to it after a typhoid epidemic in 1913. Nearly all major cities followed suit in the next few years, and the infant and child mortality rate plummeted.

So, Republicans want to murder your children. This is objectively true.