Here’s why a lot of mums stop breastfeeding

HAS it ev e r occurred to the breast- is- best lobby that there may be a very simple reason why so few women in Britain breastfeed long-term?

They don’t want to. not that they can’t, or that they are being stigmatised, or that there aren’t enough ‘ safe’ breastfeeding spaces or government-funded support groups.

They just don’t want to — and that’s why only 0.5 per cent of British women are still doing it after 12 months, the lowest rate in the world.

i’d say that’s a pretty clear message. After all, the remaining 99.5 per cent can’t all be lazy, feckless mothers who can’t be bothered to care for their children properly

Might it be, perhaps, that there are other factors at work here? not according to the royal College of Paediatrics, which this week decreed that children as young as 11, including boys, should be taught about breastfeeding at school in order to help ‘normalise’ the practice.

Quite aside from the fact that you’d think teachers have far more pressing problems, all this initiative does is prove how out of touch with the lives of real women the medical establishment really is.

Because the truth is that in an age when most women work, breastfeeding for a prolonged period just isn’t practical. nor, to be frank, is it necessary. i can understand the importance of sticking to the breast if, say, you are living in sub-Saharan Africa with no clean water, antibiotics or immunisation.

But most women in Britain have all of the above, as well as a vast array of perfectly healthy alternatives to breast milk

Whether to breastfeed or not, and for how long, is therefore a real choice for women in Britain. And, as the statistics reveal — in Brazil, 56 per cent of babies still have breast milk after a year — it’s something we are choosing not to do.

of course, saying this is heresy. Thanks to the breastfeeding lobby, pregnant women are blitzed with breastfeeding propaganda right from their very first nHS appointment.

new mums aren’t even allowed to leave hospital until they’ve shown they can do it. Which is why so many mothers make excuses. Their baby won’t latch on, they haven’t got enough milk, they get mastitis — anything to avoid telling the truth, which is that it’s a messy, tiresome and quite often frustrating process.

That women hate feeling like a prize Friesian cow, that they long to get back into their pretty silk bras and out of those ugly over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders.

THATthe reality — screaming baby, colic, exhaustion, raging hormones — is very far removed from the fantasy of the rosy- cheeked infant suckling peacefully in mother’s arms.

But that is not a narrative the breastfeeding lobby accept. instead, they make new mothers feel like failures, implying that even a drop of formula milk is tantamount to child abuse.

And the fiction isn’t limited to those early months either. The breast obsessives are endlessly urging women to breastfeed in public and in front of unsuspecting work colleagues.

But unless you happen to work for an islington woman’s collective, most of these suggestions are wholly impractical.

in the real world, the reality for any breastfeeding working mother is sitting in the ladies’, expressing your milk. it’s possibly one of the most depressing experiences known to womankind — and second only to looking down during a business meeting to find that you have leaked through your shirt.

Would that we lived in a utopia where all women can afford to take a whole year off without full pay to wean their infants. But we don’t. Feminism put paid to that long ago.

now that we have the right to work like men, perhaps the time has come to accept that there is no such thing as ‘ having it all’. And that includes breastfeeding.