Antagonism to Breast-feeding Runs Deep

As a long-term breastfeeder - I fed each of my four daughters until their third birthday - you might think I’d be reveling in the spate of interest in women who choose to feed their children beyond the age of two. This new-found fascination got its latest airing last night, with a program on Channel 4 called Extraordinary Breastfeeding. The program, which highlighted the stories of four women feeding children aged between two and seven, purported to celebrate a woman’s right to breastfeed long-term, but you don’t have to know the TV industry inside out to guess that public service probably wasn’t uppermost in the commissioning editor’s mind. Because breastfeeding a kid past babyhood is weird, isn’t it? Slap a program on the telly about the mothers who do it and you invite an audience that is going to be at best skeptical and at worst disapproving and maybe even prurient.

We live in a society that has lost confidence in the ability of mothers to breastfeed infants. Our breastfeeding rates are among the lowest in the world - only a tiny minority of mothers continue to do so until their children are an "extraordinary" age. Anyone will be able to tell you one thing about breastfeeding - that it’s best - but will then be happy to inform you that that’s only if you can manage it. The result is that every day hundreds of new mothers who encounter a (minor) hitch in breastfeeding their baby hear the message, "If it isn’t working, use a bottle." So they do. Tragically, 90% of them later say they regret giving up.

Here’s the fallout: breastfeeding is now unusual, at least beyond the early weeks. Do it for longer than about six months and you’re odd. Do it for as long as two years and you’re really odd - odd enough for a TV company to go looking for you to make a program about you.

None of this is doing anything to promote breastfeeding. It reminds me of an experience I once had while breastfeeding one of my daughters on a bus, feeling someone’s disapproval and then noticing that my critic was a fiftysomething bloke with a copy of the Sun under his arm. Tits, you see, are fine on page three, where they’re prettied up to feed the fertile male imagination, but a bit tasteless put to the use for which they have evolved, feeding a child.

This breastfeeding antagonism runs deep, but unpicking it could make us a healthier society in lots of ways. Meanwhile, the Department of Health sits on the fence, baying its support for breastfeeding from time to time while doing precious little to invest in working out what really would make a difference. You might find it astonishing to hear that the DoH supports the World Health Organization code, which says mothers should breastfeed exclusively to six months and as an add-on to other foods until the age of two. I find that astonishing, because there’s not much evidence that they do anything to promote it. The irony is that promoting breastfeeding could fulfil government targets in improving the health of the next generation, reducing future heart disease and obesity, and giving today’s young the best chance of a long and healthy life.

But hardly anyone believes in breastfeeding any more. The watchword at the DoH is that promoting breastfeeding smacks of "nanny statism", which means it’s bad politics and best avoided. Choice is the buzzword: women should be free to choose to feed their baby by breast or bottle. Which would be fine if we were talking about real choice, but where is the choice in a country so deeply suspicious of whether women’s bodies are up to it and whether it’s what they should be doing with their breasts? Sadly, the day can’t be far away when breastfeeding is regarded as anything but what it should be: unremarkable and ordinary in the extreme.

• The author writes on parenting issues