6-8 weeks after a baby is born, mum and baby will have a check with their GP. I’m a GP and I’ve done many of these now. One of the questions we ask is how the baby is fed. I must admit I now have that sinking feeling asking the question, because alot of mothers who use formula milk will look at me with a sense of shame as they admit their feeding method. Now I am a mother and I sit of the other side of the desk, and I’m ashamed to admit I feel a sense of guilt having given my eldest some formula milk.

How have we got to a state where a mother feels they need to hide the way they give milk to their child? So we give formula – and we are judged for ‘failing’ our child. We breastfeed our child – and we get judged for getting a boob out in public. We express breastmilk and give in a bottle – and I’ve known people to be judged for giving a bottle to a baby and not offering the cuddles that a breast brings. We can’t win.

Education and informed choice

Some women don’t want to breastfeed. That is obviously completely ok – although I would argue it’s ok if that woman has had a chance to weigh up all the information on feeding for herself. This brings me to my first main point – lack of education. Education to women, mothers, men, children, society. Did anyone ever have a lesson on feeding a baby at school? When do we ever learn about it? Most of us will just hear about our mum’s journey, hear about some horror stories and have an NCT session on feeding. There is a raft of literature on both breast and formula feeding. Yes, you can read a summary from some – hopefully legit – website, but it’s a really complex issue that I honestly think needs much more face to face education. For everyone.

Breastfeeding support

Then there are many women who want to breastfeed but for a large number of reasons can’t. I personally very much feel for these women now I have personal experience of how shockingly hard breastfeeding can be. I have survived stretches of 7 night 12 hour shifts working in some of the busiest A&Es, but trying to breastfeed stands out as the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It completely broke me. My baby, Nina, would nibble off so much skin and tissue she significantly changed the shape of my nipple in the early days – yes, so much of the ouch. I recall one evening curled up in the corner of the lounge, crying with a whole array of emotions from guilt through to failure as I desperately tried to google someone who could help me breastfeed my child. And I’m a GP! I should know where to get the help! But I didn’t. How embarrassing, yes, but if I didn’t know, what about those who don’t happen to work in healthcare? I had the confidence to drive back to hospital, to an environment I know well, and ask for the specialist breastcare help from the ward, but would all women? In the end I managed to breastfeed my firstborn with expressed breastmilk for the large majority of her first 6 weeks, until, with the exceptional help of a health visitor, I was able to overcome the enormous number of issues to be able to directly breastfeed.

This brings me to my second main point – support. Women need support from day 1 of having their baby. All healthcare professionals try their best. My midwives have by and large been super, but they weren’t breastfeeding specialists. If someone had come to see me as a GP prior to my personal experience, my knowledge and advice I would have given on the topic would have been pretty limited. We need to be better as healthcare professionals at getting mothers the help from the word GO with breastfeeding. Day 7 is too late to offer help. I cannot stress this enough. Figures show most people have – quite understandably – thrown in the towel by then. We need professional help offered on Day 1.

Need for the right kind of feeding chats

There has now been some move towards not being up-in-your-face about breastfeeding. Healthcare professionals are not now allowed to be seen to over-pressure mothers to breastfeed. I totally get it. Infact, I definitely get this having now been personally exposed to the breastfeeding world. For some reason you can get the mothers that I term the breastfeeding police – those mothers who will judge you as their hobby for your despicable choice of giving your child something other than a boob. Interestingly I’ve seen the same mothers been totally fine having their kid exposed to or engage in other arguably unhealthy activity. Which links in with these annoying pesks not actually being interested in the health benefits breastfeeding may confer – they are interested in rubbing it in your face. I mean, how old are we?!

But women still need the information. We should be given this and processing it much, much earlier (like years earlier in my opinion) than when you’re holding your newborn. And then on the flipside healthcare professionals don’t like harping on about the amazingness of formula. So what you end up getting is something similar to what I got an a session put on for expectant mums nearby – none of the healthcare professionals talked about any feeding. One of them did try in fairness, but they were quickly shut down by a colleague. How ridiculous.

Feeding – a balanced view?

I was originally spurred on to write this blog by an article I saw in in the BMJ (British Medical Journal, kind of a big thing in the doctor world). Earlier this year the BMJ pulled all advertising of formula milk citing the negative impact it’s had on the breastfeeding world. They took alot of backlash for doing this as you can probably imagine. This month BMJ published an article on the impact of formula on the environment. I get it, we are (quite rightly) now in the day and age that any and all manufacturers of anything that has an unacceptable carbon footprint need calling out. But publish an article without giving a balanced view? Breastfeeding has an environmental impact! If you express breastmilk, you will usually do so now with a machine, and have to express into a bottle and store in a freezer with plastic bags. Even if you admirably exclusively breastfeed with no expressing, you eat TONS more food – that has an environmental impact. The article in my opinion was published by the BMJ in an attempt to justify their stance taken against formula milk. Even a renowned medical journal fails to give us all the information we need to be able to make our own minds up about milk for our babies.

How we choose to feed our baby has somehow become a hugely contentious minefield of an issue. And it absolutely should not and need not be. So much judging, so much negativity, so much misunderstanding, lack of kindness, lack of support. And a woman is exposed to all of this just as she’s pushed out a watermelon or had the pleasure of being sliced open on a chopping board.

Judging needs to stop.

Everyone needs better education. Women need better support – however they choose to feed their baby.