"But if you look at what they are actually doing, a lot of them were topping up feeds or letting their husband give a nightly bottle when they needed to sleep. For them to answer "mixed feeding" in a survey, they would have had a far larger proportion of non-breast. "
As far as I'm aware in the DOH Infant Feeding Survey, which is done every 5 years in the UK and is take as a primary source of information on rates of breastfeeding for the purposes of policy, if a woman is giving even one breastfeed a day, she's included in the breastfeeding statistics. The vast majority of bf mothers in the UK are mixed feeding. In our local hospital over 50% of breastfed babies are being given formula top ups (mostly unnecessarily) before they even go home. Less than 1% of six month old babies are exclusively breastfed in the UK.
"There is a very established view in this country, that if you do give in and give a top-up, you have then compromised your breastfeeding- so you might as well give it up altogether".
Women are told - rightly - that using formula, particularly while trying to establish breastfeeding, can and often does compromise your chance of continuing to breastfeed in the medium to long term. They are also told that exclusive breastfeeding is linked to the best health outcomes. They are told these things because a) it's important that they know this and b) because they are true. If intelligent women read this information and choose to interpret it as meaning: 'If I give a bottle of formula then I've got to stop breastfeeding all together/will definitely fail at breastfeeding/it's not worth me continuing to breastfeed' then really, you have to ask yourself what's going on in their heads.
"then there are quite a number of positive things that can be done, without insulting or offending those women who have chosen not to bf."
Of course, but women can't make an informed choice as to whether to breastfeed/continue to breastfeed unless they are aware of the advantages as well as the disadvantages of both breastfeeding as well as formula feeding. If you hold back information on the health risks associated with formula feeding for the purpose of saving the feelings of those people who can't/don't wish to breastfeed, then you are distorting the issue in a way which, in my view is morally indefensible. We are adults and we have a responsibility to make an informed choice for our children.
Re: maternity leave, the majority of bf babies have been raised successfully by working mothers, as paid maternity leave is only a very recent invention, and isn't available to the majority of working and breastfeeding mothers around the world. I appreciate it's harder to bf your baby if you are separated from them (having gone back to work when my first was 5 weeks old, and while I was still exclusively bf), but most women in the UK have at least 6 months of maternity leave, by which time it's much easier to combine work with breastfeeding than it is in the early postnatal days.
"IE: if you dont BF your going to get cancer, if you dont BF,, if your are a poor family and dont bf then your child will be thick."
But nobody has said this or implied it. Not even WWC! There is a HUGE difference in the meaning of these two statements: 'women who don't breastfeed have higher rates of breast cancer' and 'If you don't breastfeed you're going to get breast cancer,' isn't there?
Why do you feel the need to make things up? Why not just attack WWC for what she has said (which is tactless and a bit glib), rather than for what she hasn't said?