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What’s the least helpful advice for a parent desperate to find scarce baby formula? “TRY BREASTFEEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.” “God literally designed mothers to feed their babies.” This is cruel to any parent who can’t make the milk their child needs. And it’s not true. Even in the best-case scenario, breastfeeding isn’t free. It costs money for the supplies that keep a nursing mother comfortable and healthy enough to keep producing milk. And it costs time. I can show you exactly how much time, because I used an app to track every minute I spent nursing and pumping over the first six months of my son’s life. (Alyssa Rosenberg, 5/31)

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the rights of thousands of Virginian women will be thrown into question. While the commonwealth does not have an abortion ban on the books, our governor has said that he is “staunchly, unabashedly” against abortion and fully committed to “going on the offense” against abortion rights in our legislature. Should Roe fall, he could well strip women of their reproductive rights — and go after thousands more who flock to the state whenever neighboring jurisdictions clamp down on abortion access. What’s more, in Virginia today women who are suspected of terminating a pregnancy without the assistance of a certified medical professional can face felony charges if they miscarry. (Steve Descano, 5/31)

Like abortion foes who wave photos of bloody fetuses outside clinics (fetuses that could not survive outside a woman’s uterus), we who oppose the annihilation of our bodily autonomy ought to plaster statehouses with photos of our episiotomy incisions, our Caesarean scars, our intravenous-line hematomas, our bloody postnatal sanitary pads and bloodstained bedsheets, our cracked nipples and infected breasts. (Kate Manning, 5/31)

The Food and Drug Administration is under attack for being too cozy with drugmakers, but there’s nothing wrong with regulators cooperating with private industry. That’s how we got Covid vaccines and therapies in record time. What’s rotten is that applications for new uses of generic drugs are reviewed under different standards than those for novel treatments. That’s what the FDA did this month when it rejected a Covid emergency-use authorization (EUA) application by doctors for the antidepressant fluvoxamine. (Allysia Finley, 5/30)

There are days now when you can almost forget about the virus. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are still being infected with COVID-19 daily — an average of about 361 Americans died from it every day in the last week — but after more than two years and millions of lost lives, the pandemic has given way in headlines and breaking-news crawls to older and more familiar atrocities. Across much of the United States, the rhythms of life have returned to something like their pre-pandemic tempo. Bars and restaurants are packed, there’s a wedding boom, and Memorial Day weekend looks likely to kick off a busy summer travel season. (Farhad Manjoo, 5/31)

In a world where pandemics are the norm, medical apartheid has become the civil rights issue of the 21st century. With most deaths occurring in 20 Black and Brown nations, about 14.9 million people died between Jan. 1, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2021. The highest number of deaths are in India, despite, or perhaps because of, it being the pharmacy of the world. (Vidya Krishnan, 5/31)

Almost exactly 20 years ago, President George W. Bush stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced a $500 million initiative in Africa and the Caribbean to reduce H.I.V. transmission from women living with H.I.V. to their newborns. The United States was already the largest donor to the newly minted Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The new initiative further solidified America as a leading contributor to what was then the most consequential global plague. Yet Mr. Bush told aides that it wasn’t enough. He wanted to do more. (Emily Bass, 6/1)