To think that "97% of women can breastfeed" is a load of crap

Yes, expectations and knowledge of the reality are really lacking. I had almost zero idea how it all works and what to expect! Cluster feeding was a completely surprise and I assumed it meant I had an issue but it just was how it is meant to be!

Lack of support- I constantly had relatives saying I was only tired/weepy/finding the early days hard because I was 'doing things the hard way, and endlessly asking when I 'would feed them properly'.

Agree re the pressures not to breastfeed. MIL was very sniffy about it and constantly asked me when I was stopping. She would ask if I was ‘still breastfeeding him’ in hushed tones, when he was 6 months old.

Edited because the quote disappeared on me and I can’t be arsed looking for it again🤣

Breastfeeding is incredibly difficult.
It really isn't for most people.
I was the last person anyone would expect to breastfeed and yet I could have fed triplets. No-one showed me it was just easy and I had literally never held a baby before mine.
you’ve completely underestimated the pressure on women NOT to breastfeed. A lot of this pressure is very subtle and, shockingly, it’s from other women
This is seldom admitted. Older women who bottle fed putting subtle pressure on that it was good enough for their baby. Men who don't want their partners to breastfeed. Whole groups of society where BFing is almost taboo (see the poster above who is a gypsy and reckons it's very rare in her community).

One way for a new mum to deal with that pressure is to say she can't rather than that it's a choice.

(As for the whole "another women must have fed the baby in the old days" - if very few women can lactate, where the hell were all these wet nurses coming from?)

Nobody said very few women could lactate. You have misunderstood if you think that. I don't know what you're defining as 'very few', but whatever it is, there'll be some middle ground between that and 97%.

Also, there is not credible evidence that formula causes autism. There's not even any evidence that rates have increased, since any fule kno we have no idea what they might've been until pretty recently and don't necessarily have accurate data even now.

Yes absolute rubbish - formula has been widely used since the 1970s

BBC History magazine had an article on it a while back. There is some information and some research.

Long story short, any issue with breastfeeding = death, generally before the advent of safe modern formula.

Oh do give over with your formula causes autism scaremongery nonsense.

Autism is highly hereditary and formula absolutely does not cause it.

I mix fed my first as I said above, and I had ‘medical’ pregnancies so I’m not one of these earth mother types desperate to lord myself over others. But this IS a very pressing public health issue, which totally deserves discussion. Yes it’s a personal choice but these are rarely fully distinct from societal pressures, cultural norms and societal health consequences.

I could breastfeed, and did for a few weeks until my health condition flared up so much that I had to go back on medication meaning I had to stop. I got a lot of 'at least you tried' from seemingly well meaning people.
I don't know how accurate the 97% figure is, but it ignores the many reasons women don't breastfeed.
Informed choice is the way forward.

This won’t be popular, but I think the female body has been utterly fucked by endocrine disrupters and birth control, and having babies far too late. Our bodies are very very finely balanced, and we are constantly messing with them via this means or that means. So many seem to have PCOS, endometriosis, adenomyosis, various hormone problems. I have multiple friends going through IVF despite being mid 30s (not young but not terribly old either). Women can’t breastfeed, the caesarean rates are sky high. It’s all a bit worrying.

I can’t believe in 2026 women are still squabbling online about how other women feed their kids.

And in some developing countries (sub Saharan Africa) the average age of weaning to solids with mixed feeding is much higher (around 3 months) - culturally mixed feeding is more acceptable and women don’t have the luxury of prolonged maternity so most will mix feed early rather than exclusively bf. Also the rate of infant death from malnutrition is much higher but difficult to tease out whether that if directly related to breastfeeding or not.

I can’t believe this is still a debate that we’re having in 2026. Breastfeeding can be incredibly hard for some people and very easy for others. For the former more support is required and telling people you physiologically CAN breastfeed or it’s very easy for some doesn’t help those who are struggling. I think normalising breastfeeding in the media / general society would be a massive help in the UK. I was lucky enough to have lots of great community infant support once I got home but in the hosptial unfortunately it was lacking - luckily I was only there for one night but I can understand why people do give up if the immediate support isn’t there in the early days.

Agree with PP that the pressure to exclusively breastfed (and from the nipple) is extreme and I think more would continue for longer if it was deemed acceptable for the odd bottle of formula or pumping. The general advice in UK is to not start pumping until 6 weeks due to supply issues / nipple confusion which I think can cause issues with bottle refusing later down the line. Pumping from day 5 caused no issues with my supply and meant I could continue bf whilst trying to establish a latch and be assessed for a tongue tie. I appreciate this isn’t the case for everyone but a lot of the advice ISNT individualised and it can’t be one size fits all. In the end I bf until I year - but without the luxury of paid maternity leave, a supportive partner who would do night feeds with expressed milk, financial access to a good pump (and one was also leant by a friend ), a healthy baby who eventually “got it”, and the support of the community breastfeeding team, this wouldn’t have been the case. Whether you can practically bf is multifactorial and not just dependant on it your breast fill with milk.

Some women really struggle with their bf journey not being as they would have hoped. If you need formula despite all the support and wasn’t planning on it, you’ve shiuld be supported and not made to feel inferior or that you haven’t tried hard enough. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. If you chose to exclusively formula feed your baby - that’s a completely valid way to feed your child.

It would be great if someone could explain that to midwives please. All I heard was "all women can breastfeed" and being made to feel a complete and utter failure as a result because I couldn't successfully and a few hundred years previously might have died from sepsis: infective mastitis and a breast abscess, rather than fail my baby. At 8.5 weeks a NCT breast feeding specialist gave me permission to stop. I had loads of milk and a growing baby but shall never forget the pain and tears.

Agreed. I found the midwives were next to useless and often gave contradictory advice.

As for why humans can't breastfeed as automatically as other mammals, that's like asking why human babies can't walk within hours of being born. They don't die all the same, but we have to learn how look after such helpless infants.

Like what? Most women have at least 6 months maternity leave, even if we only counted first or second born babies to discount the pressure of caring for multiple older siblings, it still doesn’t make sense.

So back in history mothers who did not want to breastfeed or who were separated from their babies employed a wet nurse. A local woman who had recently had a baby would feed both her own baby and her "nursechild". If you couldn't afford a wet nurse, then people fed babies on things like mushed up bread and water, and yes, lots died. But again separating the babies who died from not being breastfed and the babies who had underlying health issues and other diseases is not easy.

Agree also that women produce milk because that's what breasts are for - assuming you don't have a c-section, assuming your baby isn't whipped away from you and put in a separate room, that you have people around you to help and support, that you don't have medical professionals or family members undermining breastfeeding by telling you the baby is hungry or that formula is the bees knees.

I breastfed and found it very easy and convenient - never having to lug around bottles etc. The first few weeks were difficult since I had to bottle feed while I pumped because baby wouldn't latch, but after that it was easy. I certainly never missed washing bottles and measuring out formula.

But that's just me. I understand other women can have very different experiences to me. Breastfeeding can be hard or difficult depending on a variety of circumstances.

One of the issues I think is that an awful lot of women who don’t manage trot out the reason as I didn’t have enough milk or I couldn’t, which for most is bullshit. They weren’t able to maybe from lack of support or they didn’t want to. But this skews the stats and new mums believe the stuff about maybe I don’t have enough milk or whatever. My own MIL told me the other day that she hasn’t BF because she didn’t have milk. I found it hard not to just raise my eyebrow. This means that the women who genuinely can’t get treated with cynicism by medical professionals and other mums alike.
If we really didn’t have enough milk the way that a lot of women say then we’d have died out as a species thousands of years ago.

That’s not feeding to sustain life though - she could’ve been on solids and water a full 2 years ago and survived without it. Strictly speaking milk for absolute survival is needed for 6-9 months, past this age other sources of food will sustain them if they are strong and healthy and capable of weaning.

I breastfed my first for 5 months then had to stop as I needed to take a medication that they were unsure if breastfeeding friendly - I decided formula would be a ‘known quantity’ so preferable if not ideal in that case. My second was EBF for a year.

I wouldn’t have done 3 years because in all the cases I see of this they neglect proper food and seem anaemic and tired as they insist on feeding all night.

I've often thought about what life would of been like for me and my DC before formula became available. They'd of perished unfortunately.

I tried to breastfeed my two living dc and ended up combi feeding as barely anything came out. I can't tell if its rubbish genes ( my boob's are tiny ) or if.... when I gave birth to my first DC at 24 weeks he died shortly after birth, my milk wouldn't stop coming. The hospital ended up giving me a tablet to stop the milk production. I'll always wonder if because my body was forced to stop producing milk shortly after birth, maybe it remembered that the next two times it gave birth? Just a theory obviously 😅... whatever the reason, when I had more DC my milk just didn't want to come through.

Firstly that assumes that breastfeeding issues are heritable - and where would be your evidence for that?
Secondly, babies have been fed by wetnurse and bottle for literally millennia, and more recently by formula. So there is no reason at all to assume that an inability to produce enough milk to feed a baby would prevent a mother from producing and raising healthy offspring.
My mum couldn't produce enough milk for either of her children, yet here we are in our 40s, thriving and passing on those genes to offspring of our own.

Good for you. I was told I didn't have milk with my first by the midwives 🙃 but I did because I pumped at home and then I bf my daughter for 2 years. A lot of the misinformation unfortunately comes from the midwives ime

I suppose we have a lot more pressures on ourselves created over the generations than other mammals have