I don't want to sound harsh, but I think this needs to be said:
Scotland's efforts to encourage more mums to breastfeed are not working. Get a piece of paper and draw a straight line free-hand from left to right - that is what the level of breastfeeding in Scotland for the last 10 years looks like.
It has not changed. Awareness campaigns, support groups, a Scottish Government target, a change in legislation to ensure women can breastfeed in public without being told to cover up appear to have made no difference - except to stop more mums turning to formula. Figures released last week confirm six to eight weeks after giving birth the number of mums breastfeeding at all is stuck at about 36.5%.
In 2011 I was one of them. I breastfed my twins girls, while looking after my two-and-a-half year-old daughter, above all because I wanted to treat them the same as I would a singleton. My own mum, so helpful in many ways at that time, told me when I was tearful from exhaustion: "The only thing I can suggest is to give them formula milk." But I believed the top public health professionals who said breast gives children the best chance of good health. I was determined, and when the NHS breastfeeding support group I attended gave me a round of applause at three months, I offered no false modesty. I still feel I deserved every clap.
Because breastfeeding is not easy and I have every sympathy with people who struggle to do it. There was a girl in my support group who was recovering from a difficult labour, who was finding feeding extremely painful, whose baby suffered from colic, who in tears in the middle of the night sterilised a bottle. "It's not poison," she told us - and she's right.
At my antenatal class reunion, when our wonderful midwife left the room, one mum whose husband worked away confessed: "Actually, I am giving a bottle of formula in the evening." Two others followed suit - and they are all the best of mothers.
The drive to encourage breastfeeding is not well enough connected to the reality of being a mother today and the strategy needs a total rethink. The way exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) is pushed gives a sense that it is natural and easy and modern mums are a bit namby-pamby for not being able to manage it. Rubbish. I would like to know if there was ever a time in the UK when most women EBF'd for six months. My own mum never used powdered milk but I was on dairy and baby rice by 18 weeks. When there was no NHS and parents were left to their own devices, or the advice of their own families, were they really given a pure diet of breast milk? For all the right reasons, are we asking mums to do something that's never been done en masse before?
When it is going well breastfeeding can be wonderful. It is warm and snugly and saves a lot of washing up. The support groups, like the one I attended, are vital though more for helping people navigate the first worrying weeks of parenthood. Good on the NHS for setting them up. But Scotland needs a new approach if it is going to increase breastfeeding rates. I keep hoping Sir Harry Burns, chief medical officer, will meet me for a chat.
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