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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

(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.

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.

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

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.

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'.

Your experience doesn’t speak for all. The many, many voices saying the opposite dispels your theory.

Plus there may well be a correlation (rather than a cause) between formula and autism because autism is hereditary and god knows parenting a newborn is a sensory overwhelming experience for most people let alone neurodiverse ones and formula feeding maybe one way of lowering that sensory noise.

I breastfed mine. I’m unsure how that should be a consideration to other women? It is simply none of my business.

I had my first in the 70s and yes I was in for seven days. The sister was very anti breastfeeding. I was in a small minority of women trying to establish breastfeeding. We were punished by not being allowed to go to the dining room until she was satisfied baby had had enough milk. So on more than one occasion there was basically no food left for me. The other two women succumbed and started giving formula. I was a bolshy teenager and did not give in. My lovely GP and district midwife gave me lots of support and I fed all four of mine for a total of nearly five years.

I suppose is the same way childhood obesity and vaccine uptake is our business. What individuals do is not our business, but mass societal decisions which had wide ranging health impacts are (eg smoking)

Yes, breastfeeding is a very specific physical and sensory experience.

It is a fact that women give up feeding because it’s uncomfortable. Three of my friends gave up; two because their nipples we’re sore- to me they weren’t getting the baby latched in well enough but they didn’t want help and were happy to use that as a reason, the third because they didn’t like the feeling - that prickly sensation. I breastfed each for a year. I regarded discomfort as part of the package. So yes 97% probably could breastfeed.

Errr they really couldn’t. When your baby is getting dehydrated and losing too much weight or maternal mental health is plummeting or you’re in agony and it’s clear you can’t- you can’t!!!

Vaccine uptake is relevant because illnesses are contagious, and smoking is relevant because it usually has negative health impacts on other people not just the smoker.

But I'm not sure this is the road you want to go down. Otherwise it becomes the business of wider society that so many more breastfed neonates are readmitted for feeding difficulties, or everyone gets to wade in on whether we should be funding breastfeeding support when formula is an alternative and we could be spending the money on other things that would have wider application instead. I don't much fancy either of those eventualities. The least worst option is everyone minding their own business about what other women do or don't do with their breasts.

I was formula fed in the 50s. National dried milk that you bought at your local health centre. Must have been widely used as the tins were everywhere particularly primary schools where they contained pencils, crayons, plastercine, word cards etc

Minding our own business is why we are where we are now.

Formula feeding is hideously expensive. I spent something like £50 a month on formula. It’s not as good as breast milk, which is free. And breastfeeding reduces the chance of some cancers in women. Not to mention the environmental impact.

There is lots of pressure on new mums and the problem is that although midwives and the NHS promote the breast is best message, they cannot back it up. Breastmilk is absolutely the best thing for your baby. There is no argument in that.

As the GP said, the issues with breastfeeding are generally not in the first 24 to 48. So it doesn't matter how well trained your hospital midwives are, by the time many mums start hitting issues, they are at home. So what options are there for support? NCT, La Leche, ABM. All volunteers. Peer supporters, again volunteers. Health visitors who may or may not know about breastfeeding, it's pure luck of the draw. Mums are surrounded by people who don't know about breastfeeding and don't understand about breastfeeding. Totally agree that seeing a baby being breastfed is unusual - I fed all three of mine but the oldest won't remember me feeding the youngest. Women are told that breastfeeding is disgusting and breasts are sexual objects. And yes, the obsession with knowing how much milk your baby is getting, and all those "sleep experts" whose idea of getting them into a routine is feeding to a schedule. So many factors conspiring against mothers.

And one of the biggest scandals is that human milk banks, which collect milk from donors, pasteurise it and use it to feed the most tiny and most vulnerable babies in NICU are not run by the NHS but by a charity. And again, whether your extremely prem baby gets human milk or less than ideal formula for their underdeveloped gut is a postcode lottery.

I think it's probably a fair statistic. I gave birth in Europe in a country where every woman was supported through at least three days in hospital, with support at every feed (I had a week with twins, with two breastfeeding support people helping them latch on for every single feed during my stay). I then had almost daily health visitor support for a month. This was all included in the health system. It was taken as read that I would succeed in breastfeeding, but not in a judgy way - I think they just know that given the right support, it really is something very achievable for almost all women. I compare that to what I perceive to be the case in the UK (I am British, and have lived in the UK most of my life) and see a lot of judgement alongside very little support. Not succeeding is linked to a failure or lack of effort from the mother. I have little confidence I would have been as successful feeding my twins had I had them in the UK.