Dear mums: don’t let the bottle bashers get you down

Katie Martin:

Still, it rankles, because it’s hard to overstate just how much pressure mums are under to banish the bottle. The bottle bashers are just one part of an overbearing commercial, social and medical enterprise that tells mums that whatever they do, however hard they try, they’re doing it wrong.

I noticed the start of the bullying in my first pregnancy, when I did what many middle-class parents do: paid to make new friends by going to tree-huggy childbirth classes. There, I was told by a lady who’d had her babies in her bathroom that real mums didn’t need to go to hospital to give birth, didn’t need pain relief in childbirth (“epidurals are for wimps!”), that newborns didn’t need vitamin K injections (they absolutely definitely do) and you can make your own mind up about vaccinations but, really, if Baby needed those chemicals, then nature would provide them, don’t you think? Oh, and, no matter how hard it is, get that baby on that boob. Bottles are bad.

After the joy of childbirth, which the lady said would be a doddle but might well have killed me and/or my daughter without some heavy-handed intervention, the midwives and health visitors kick in. Are you breastfeeding? You must breastfeed. Finding it painful? Running a fever? Whatever. (I’m a farmer’s lass, from a cattle farm, but hadn’t realised that mastitis could affect humans.) Are you crying day and night because the baby’s screaming the house down, losing weight, can’t latch on? That’s just how it goes. No bottles. We won’t discharge you until we know you’re breastfeeding. Say hello to “the Breastapo”.