@RoosterPie
But you do see a lot of implications of not having tried hard enough to breast feed with comments such as very few women are medically unable to etc, and the OP’s comments about what she went through to breastfeed are part of a vibe where people think if you just try hard enough and persevere you can breastfeed. I Passionately believe in supporting women who want to breastfeed, but I find that a very damaging message. It doesn’t work for shitloads of women for all sorts of reasons and holding breastfeeding up as an achievement does carry the implication that trying at breastfeeding and it not working is a failure. Hence why it’s emotive.
It is emotive, and I don't like the word failure. It's a LOSS. For women who want to breastfeed and for whatever reason don't achieve it - it is (or can be) a huge wound, and we don't heal that either with judgement or by telling them it doesn't matter because fed is best. Like it didn't help me for people to tell me it doesn't matter how the birth went, the important thing is that you have a healthy baby.
What people (myself included) are trying to do, possibly clumsily, by questioning the biologically incapable of bf statistic - not, I hasten to add, individual stories, that is shite as we are not that woman and do not know her body - is to offer a more hopeful narrative to women out there wanting to breastfeed, struggling to breastfeed, who see the rates in this country and see an insurmountable obstacle for all but the chosen few. Not to tell other women they 'should have tried harder'.
The fact is UK women are NOT biologically different to women in say Canada or Sweden. What we do have is a culture completely inimical to breastfeeding, with totally unrealistic expectations of mothers that make establishing feeding almost impossible, with ridiculous amounts of outdated and misleading information around.
Now I'm well aware the last thing a woman suffering breastfeeding loss needs is to hear someone say that if she'd got the right information/support or whatever she could have continued to feed. I'm well aware there are women who feel they tried absolutely everything, did everything they were told, and it just kicks them in the teeth to hear this and rips open the wound. I don't want to do that to other women, I don't want to cause them pain.
But I also don't want women who are just looking at their options, or who are doing the umpteenth night time feed alone with sore boobs and wondering how on earth they are going to function tomorrow with a busy to-do list, and how their baby can possibly be feeding so much if they're getting enough, etc etc, to believe that she and/or her baby are of the majority who 'can't breastfeed' and stop before she's ready.
I want her to consider that the odds that are stacked against her may be outside of her and her baby, not inside them necessarily. And give her hope she can do what she feels she wants/needs to do. I was lucky and people reached out to me online... So I can absolutely understand what the OP was trying to do. It meant more to me to know someone else had struggled and got through than it would have meant for people to tell me it didn't matter. It mattered to me.
Treading that line is a bugger. It depends on whether one thinks it's more important to honour the feelings of those who have suffered the loss of the breastfeeding they wanted, or to try and prevent more women joining their ranks. And it's flipping hard to know what's right.
But I don't think it is right to tell women it doesn't matter/isn't worth it because there's no significant benefit to the baby - as if her wishes don't come into it. As if there might not be all sorts of reasons quite outwith that she might want to breasteed.