Team Breast or Team Bottle? I'm team Feed The Hungry Baby.

This week a British journalist wrote a column about breastfeeding. What happened next was ugly in the extreme.

There’s something about pregnant women and mothers with newborns that makes them apparent public property.

Open slather for strangers’ comments.

Myself, visibly pregnant, I’ve been refused a serve of feta cheese at a BBQ by a perfect stranger. I didn’t get to decide for myself whether or not I would eat the feta, which she claimed was included in the soft cheese family (is it? I don’t even know!) The opportunity to use my not inconsiderable level of brainpower to make a decision for myself was denied me.

Taking my six-month-old for a walk into town for a coffee one day many years ago, a man I’ve not seen before or since asked me to cover my baby’s feet lest they get sunburnt. I snapped that he had sunscreen on, thank you very much. I’m perfectly capable of assessing the likely damage sunshine will do to my baby.

However, these small examples pale into comparison when we consider the great breast or bottle question.

This week, British writer Bryony Gordon, felt the full force of the breast-bottle battle when she wrote this story in the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper, questioning if breast really is best in all cases for all women.

She describes the experiences of a number of women who were not provided with the support they required to successfully breastfeed, in some cases under very difficult circumstances, and but who were pushed by the health system to breastfeed without consideration for the mother’s needs or in fact their baby’s needs.

Sarah spent three months trying to breastfeed her daughter, Lola. Her newborn showed all the signs of being undernourished, but every time she went to a breastfeeding clinic they simply sent her home with a list of things to improve her milk supply: eat lots of porridge, take fenugreek tablets.

She eventually found her daughter had tongue-tie (a condition that makes sucking difficult) but the nurse wouldn’t carry out the simple, 60-second, in most cases pain-free procedure to treat it, because she thought that Lola’s high palate might also be causing a problem.

In excruciating pain, Sarah continued, weeping and feeding, weeping and feeding, until her mother insisted on giving Lola a bottle of formula. “The relief in my daughter’s eyes was instant. I was forcing her to breastfeed, and she clearly hated it. I hated it too. I thought to myself, 'Who am I doing this for?’ And I knew I was doing it for the health visitors, for the midwives, for the mums I’d met who told me they felt bad for formula-fed babies.”

Further, Gordon cites some recent research that really does call into question the case for breastfeeding. She concludes that whatever decision a mother makes in relation to feeding her child, she ought to be supported in that decision. Outrageous.

Gordon copped a lot of flack for her piece. One woman on Twitter accused her of being okay if her child died. Gordon herself responded online to the criticism “Wow. You write a piece about people not being able to breastfeed, and suddenly you are anti-breastfeeding. Strange world.”

Meanwhile, the blogger who founded a site called Fearless Formula Feeders, trying to host a safe positive community for women who seek support and solace from their own experiences of feeding their babies, regularly comes under attack for apparently failing to promote what is seen to be the only option for mothers and their babies.

Team Breast? Team Bottle? Personally, I’m Team Feed the Hungry Baby.

But more importantly, I’m Team Leave that Mother the Hell Alone.

Whether you bottle-feed or you breast feed, someone somewhere has else has usually got something to say about it. It might be a tight lipped remark about the dubious claim that mothers that breastfeed have a stronger bond with their babies than mothers that bottle feed.

It might be being pointed to the public toilet when you try to breastfeed your baby in public.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Women, no matter how they feed their babies are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

We have determined a set criteria for a “good” mother, and it includes blindly adhering to the strict 6-month exclusive breast-feeding rule without consideration of any other factors.

Perversely, over reaching that standard is also an opportunity for people with little or no connection to a mother to question whether or not her children will suffer as a result. Never forget the outcry over the TIME magazine cover, “Are you Mom enough” picturing a TIME staff writer, Kate Pickert, breastfeeding her pre-school aged son.

But here’s the thing. The choices that individual women make privately about their own bodies and their own children should not be up for public discussion.

Women’s bodies are not public property. Women’s choices are not open to you or your Dad or your next door neighbour or your Great Aunt Suzie to get a say in.

Your job, your ONLY job, is to tell the new mother in your life that she’s doing great, bring her a curry to stick in the freezer and offer to do the vacuuming.

Was there a lot of pressure on you to breastfeed when you had your baby? Did being persistent pay off, or not?  

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