"I decided I wouldn't breastfeed my son long before he was born."

I remember lying on the trolley in pre-op before being wheeled in for my elective caesarean, and the annoyingly cheerful midwife tried to calm my nerves by saying, “In a couple of hours you’ll be back on the ward with your baby, and we’ll be talking about breastfeeding!”

“Actually”, I replied, “there’s a tin of formula and some bottles in my bag; we’ll be using those instead.”

She was clearly taken aback, but fortunately accepting of my choice, which is why we had chosen that particular hospital.

You see, the hospital I had given birth to my first baby at had one of those terribly anti-bodily-autonomy “baby friendly” policies, which meant they shoved breastfeeding down new mothers’ throats at all costs.

It was an enormously traumatic experience for me, especially the part where they watched and judged my breastfeeding technique before they would discharge me, although I was in agony and the closest to being taught how to breastfeed I’d come was the midwife in the delivery room grasping my breast so hard that she actually bruised it badly and shoving it into my minutes-old daughter’s mouth.

Approximately eight days later, I got a prescription for some meds to dry up the milk, put my daughter on formula, and thriving, we never looked back.

I wasn’t as confident back then about my own choices, and I felt judged, especially when my husband’s mother whom I had never even met bought me a subscription to the Australian Breastfeeding Association. Awkward.

However, seeing how my firstborn baby thrived on formula, and feeling how much happier it made me cemented the certainty that for me, breast isn’t always best.

So when I became pregnant with my son, I made the executive decision to not even try this time, to skip the trauma of birth by having an elective caesarean, and skip the trauma of trying to breastfeed by going straight to formula. I don't feel the least bit guilty about it.

My obstetrician was supportive, and prescribed me some kind of magical wonder tablets which I took immediately after he was born and which prevented my milk coming in.

In doing this, I was opened up to a world of mothers who had made the same choice as me, but do not openly talk about it. They don’t talk about it, because the “breast is best” message has been so over-zealously ingrained in new and expectant mothers that they’re ashamed and feel guilty if they can’t, or choose not to breastfeed.

However, I’m proud to have made the decision that was best for me and my baby and by extension, our whole family.

I wish more mothers would be told that it’s their body, and their choice rather than that not breastfeeding will make them failures. We live in a developed country with access to top quality infant formula, clean water, and equipment to sterilise bottles.

Walk into any school classroom in the country, and you won’t be able to tell which kids were breastfed and which kids were formula fed; just that they were fed. And fed is best.