Yes suz and cornflower, the number of people who tell you what you should be doing is a big part of the whole judgmental problem. I wanted to breastfeed but I was told by many other women (so I do take your point cornflower) that I should bottle-feed. My best friend wanted to bottle-feed. This is what her mother did and she chose to do the same and had strong reasons for wanting this for her children. Cornflower, I don't watch daytime TV and I'm not planning on joining a craft group, but it was good to be reminded about where most of the "get over yourself" mentality seems to come from in terms of choosing breast over bottle or visa versa. Now ... breastfeeding in public I believe is another matter and it would be interesting to get the men into the conversation on this one to see how their pro or against opinions rate on this topic. You see, you can't remove the subject from the context.

When I read this article I thought that it strangely reflected the whole problem of breast-feeding. Simply that we humans think to much.

It would be a interesting thing to compare rates of breast-feeding problems between cultures. I suspect in this culture we over-complicate things by worrying. I breast-fed for about 6 years (to much information!) and never had a problem other than a touch of mastitis.

I think this was mostly as I was with a bunch of women who just took it as granted that you would breast-feed. Afterall, sheep, horses, camels, etc. do it without to much thought why shouldn't we? I was also studying monkeys (who also do it!) and other cultures especially hunter-gatherer societies at the time at post-graduate level who definately also did it. The problems they experience might be under-reported but it seems not to be a major problem in less western societies.

Anyway breast or bottle-fed, they all grow up to be great noisy teenagers in the end who keep their parents on the hop and nobody can tell the difference between which ones were on the boob or the bottle.

There are few more emotional topics than breastfeeding. How strange that something so natural, evolved for the optimum survival of both milk-producing and milk-fed mammals on this planet, should have become so controversial.
An animal that cannot feed from its mother will die, and the mother's milk supply will dwindle for lack of demand, so nature makes sure that instinct and hormones rule them both by making them a bonded, synchronised pair. Similarly the human mother and baby are both programmed for breastfeeding. If this were not best for both, we wouldn't have evolved that way.

In natural circumstances we don't need to teach mammals how to feed their young. But now zoo-reared monkeys have to be shown videos to learn what should come naturally. Human beings today are living just as unnaturally as they, and we too need education.

One of the major achievements of the Nursing Mothers Association of the 1970s was to educate doctors, midwives and baby health nurses about breastfeeding. It was a national phenomenon that ordinary mothers supporting each other in groups were supplying original research data for medical students' PhDs in lactation and neo-natal care.

These mums learned through hard-won experience that successful breastfeeding depends on confidence. Confidence comes from education: nipple preparation in pregnancy, learning about the supply and demand mechanism (more suckling = more milk) and the many benefits, physical and emotional, that breastfeeding brings to both mother and child. The whole family benefits.

All the hormones and instincts are still here. Today's women can feed their babies. Very, very few cannot. We just need to relax and let them work -- unless we allow our increasingly unnatural lifestyle to interfere. Failure to feed is a failure of our so-called civilisation.

It's sad that for lack of essential education and kindly support, many families will miss a loving and creative, even spiritual experience. Let's not add to that irrecoverable loss by uninformed judgment from either side of the breast v bottle debate.