This argument makes me really sad and I beat myself up for a long long time over my failure to feed DS. My "excuse" is that I didn't have enough milk. DS was tiny when he was born, and jaundiced and losing weight and never woke up to feed and never make a sound and I had to wake him every three hours to try to get him to latch on and strip him down to wake him up and put cold water on him to wake him up and then when he got on he'd stay there fore 45 mins - 1.5 hours and still never gained weight. Latch checked, MW's all agreeing he's latched on and feeding nicely when he does it. He used to scream the house down though whilst he's about it which was distressing for all of us.
I started expressing and did this regularly after feeding DS so I was nursing him for 45mins - 1.5 hours then taking another 45mins - 1.5 hours to express a tiny amount of milk. It was soul destroying and exhuasting.
I was advised to mix-feed and tried really hard to ensure as much as possible I was using the bottle to feed him the expressed milk. Where there wasn't enough expressed I used formula. I had to do this because he was very close to being admitted to hospital as failure to thrive and at this point a MW was coming daily, since they were so worried about him.
Now I wanted to breastfeed, all my friends were BFing, I live in an area with high rates, it's totally normal here. But I also wanted my baby to thrive and he wasn't. Formula would help him get there so formula is what we used.
I also noticed during this time that my milk started off beautiful, yellow and creamy and changed to pale and watery. I asked the MW, is this normal? She said yes but I think not. I think I was more stressed than I would let on and not eating or drinking enough to make a quality milk. I think I had a tiny baby who was hard to feed. I think I have huge boobs and inverted nipples. I think my milk never established for whatever reason because they never went hard, my nipples never elongated and essentially they just dried up. We just stopped and there was no pain, no withdrawal.
I also think that OPs such as this are hugely detrimental, specifically to women like me who aren't making excuses. We tried, it didn't work. Why is that your problem? I think we all forget we are essentially animals, subject to natural selection. In the natural order of things some babies aren't supposed to thrive. The babies of Mum's who couldn't feed or had poor uality milk would once have died. My baby didn't because I had the support I needed to understand there was another way.
I beat myself up a lot less about this before I joined MN and tortured myself reading endless BF/FF debates. MN is a source for support sure but don't forget these words on a screen can hurt people who are already feeling vulnerable.
Also - we're not martyrs, we all do what is best for our child. Just because you spent 24 hours a day feeding and it worked for you doesn't mean we didn't try hard enough. I tried a 24 hour feeding cycle and still got a weak undernourished baby.