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

[elliejjtiny]

I've been seeing this phrase a lot over the years, about how 97% of women can breastfeed and all the rest of the people who say they can't just need support.

I would guess that 97% of women can probably produce milk (although I wouldn't be surprised if it was lower) but there is so much more to breastfeeding than the mum producing milk which never seem to be mentioned. Mums with disabilities/medical conditions, babies with disabilities/medical conditions, babies who are born prematurely, mums separated from their babies and mums on medication that means they can't breastfeed.

When people gaily spout that 97% of women can breastfeed I find is so annoying and inaccurate. It's usually the same people who want the number of c-sections reduced as well and think that everyone can give birth with no interventions, they just need to stay mobile and ignore the nasty doctors.

1.2 x 10 does not equate to anywhere near 33% love….

This is true, and there have been, and continue to be, a lot of very unethical practices by formula companies in the pusuit of profit. That needs to be addressed.
However, there is a need for an alternative to breastfeeding. There always has been and there always will be. For all kinds of reasons, both social and medical there never has been and never will be a time when all babies can be fully fed breastmilk by their own mothers. If you look at the history of infant feeding there have always been alternatives, be that other women's milk, other animals' milk or home made alternatives like pap. It's testament to the resilience of humans that any babies survived some of these things, though of course many died. (Google "murder bottles" from the 19th century.) Even when I was a baby in the 1960s the "national dried milk" I was fed was basically dried cows' milk powder with a few vitamins added. Modern formula is not anything like the copy of breastmilk that the manufacturers would like us to believe it is, but, for most babies it is an adequate substitute and it's definitely better than what we had in the past.
We need to remember that left entirely to Mother Nature a lot of babies and mothers who thrive today would die, never be born or even conceived. The past was not some kind of bucolic idyll where happy, rosy faced mothers all breastfed their bouncing babies. And ask any farmer about their animals - there are always a percentage of lambs, calves etc that need to be hand rearered. In the wild, animal babies who aren't fed just die. Lactation is not infalliable in any species.
The problem that we have here is that formula feeding has become the norm rather than the alternative, and yes, that absolutely needs to be challenged, as do unethical business practices. But if formula disappeared overnight it would just create new problems - or rather old problems. Women wouldn't all start magically breastfeeding, they'd return to using less suitable alternatives and babies would suffer. I'm all for beter control, but it is undeniable that formula has its place.

Agree. Cluster feeding is either SO misunderstood, or women are using it as a reason to escape.

A huge number of babies died. A woman living in a poor part of Africa today has a 1 in 8 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth over her lifetime. Women dying shortly after giving birth has been incredibly common for all of human history. Their babies either die, are breast fed by another woman or in modern times given formula. There are historical artefacts of babies bottles in existence- feeding babies animal milk or mixed cereal is not a new phenomenon.

Yanbu. Everyone has their own abilities and not every woman can bf easily enough to make a baby thrive. BF is not the panacea it's made out to be. Luckily for the developed parts of the world we do have safe water and formula to ensure a baby is fed.

I had masses of milk, was pumping and storing from day three and DC never even lost weight in those early days. I was probably first in the queue when milk producing ability was handed out.

97% of women can. That’s the point

Not 33% though. The risk doesn't multiply - it's highest for the first child because that's the unknown test of the mother's capacity to give birth. After that the next four or five at least are generally pretty safe (with exceptions). Then you get age starting to have an effect.

(My evidence for that is that when I was growing up in Northern Ireland, large families were still the norm, and the rule at our local NHS hospital was that the first baby had to be born in hospital, then the next could be a home birth - or in the separate midwife-run unit which was opened in the mid 70s - and then for 6th and subsequent babies they wanted the mother back in hospital, just in case. Even that was out of an excess of caution - just in case.)

I expect most women who have had children can then produce breast milk so 97% sounds about right. Wanting to or doing it is a different thing. I didn’t breastfeed as I didn’t want to

Prehistoric baby bottles with traces of animal fats inside:

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/september/prehistoric-baby-bottles.html

Those could have been for babies whose mothers had died though. It's not actually evidence that women who lived were unable/unwilling to breastfeed.

97% may have the equipment but it absolutely doesn’t mean they can- babies, circumstances, health and many other factors impact that.

This is what I don’t get. Why do we as a species find it so hard to feed our young compared with other mammals? It doesn’t make sense at all. If only 50% of women could breastfeed to 6 months, then by far the biggest source of infant deaths in the past would be starvation, but it wasn’t.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.