I have been trying to wrap my head around it.

The numbers are chilling: approximately 53,000 infants sick. 13,000 hospitalized. At least 3 dead. It’s not happening in our back yard—and the FDA says it won’t—but that doesn’t make it any less astonishing. While I hear the experts calling for “more regulation” and “better quality controls” for Chinese food products, I don’t hear anyone calling for something else that might make a big difference: support for breastfeeding.

According to the Washington Post’s John Pomfret, the rate of breastfeeding in China is low. One study has found that 47.9% of women in Beijing were breastfeeding at 4 months; another suggested that rates in the area were as low as 13.6%.

Whatever the specific numbers, it seems clear that parents in China have embraced formula-feeding, probably for many of the same reasons U.S. parents have: convenience, return to work, belief that formula is “as good as” or “nearly as good as” breastmilk. (In case you wonder, it’s not.)

And look at the price they’re paying. Chinese parents fed their babies infant formula, which they thought was regulated, tested,  and safe. Safe for their babies. Imagine the heartache and sense of betrayal. Imagine the “if onlys”.

For parents raised in a culture with the expression ren nai zhi bai bing (Human milk cures 100 illnesses), the first “if only” must be: “If only I had not used formula.”

I do not write to blame the parents, but to imagine and empathize with their feelings. It’s likely that all parents worry at some time about causing their infant children to be hurt by making a poor choice. These parents did. The formula should have been safe, but it must be heart-rending to think that there was another, safe feeding choice readily available. One that would have contained no melamine and needed no external regulators or quality control checks to ensure its safety.

Parents, please listen. This problem didn’t happen here, but it could have. Infant formula in the U.S. has been contaminated by Enterobacter sakazakii, and even metal shavings. (You may be surprised to note that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have issued a joint statement of caution that powdered infant formula is not sterile and can cause infection leading to illness and even death in at-risk infants.) But the problem in China could have been avoided altogether if Chinese mothers received breastfeeding support from their health care providers, workplaces, families, and society.

“If only” isn’t helpful to the infants who have been sickened, those who have died, or their families. But it is hard not to think that the real call shouldn’t be for Li Changjiang, the chief of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine to step down. (After all, this isn’t the first problem China’s had with its infant formula, and I am skeptical that it will be the last.) It shouldn’t be for Nestlé to admit its role in the problem. It should be for us to think about how we—as people—feed our young, vulnerable infants. And what we can do to protect them.

To think, it was just a few decades ago that breastfeeding was, to use Pomfret’s term, “universal” in China. I wish it were now.