"i know how to support bfing: pay for childcare for a woman's other children when she's on her own and needs to cluster feed!"
Expat - can't comment on your particular situation (which I'm sure I remember you saying is very difficult) but I know this much: that I and the vast majority the bf mums I know locally have neither money, time, energy nor help around the house, but we still managed to establish breastfeeding and live normal family lives. And no - this isn't about being 'superior', it's just a fact. Women who come from cultures where breastfeeding is the norm generally manage to establish breastfeeding while living normal family lives.
I went back to work part time when my first was 5 weeks old. I returned to work part time weeks after my third was born. I am the laziest and most knackered person I know. I honestly cannot see how, apart from for a couple of short weeks at the very beginning of my children's lives when I was still physically recovering from their births and when I was breastfeeding very frequently, bottlefeeding would have made life easier for me. I had no one else around to do the feeds for me and as my husband works full time in a demanding job I'd feel bad about asking him to get up in the night to do bottlefeeds. And thinking back - apart from the first week after each birth, which I mostly spent on the sofa because I bled pretty heavily initially, I was still able to do the school run, even while coping with bf a newborn.
I suspect that half the problem people have with establishing breastfeeding in this country isn't that they're too busy to do it - it's that they have 'technical' problems with breastfeeding caused by poor breastfeeding management in hospital and by poor care from mw's in the week or so after the birth, and this makes things ten time harder than it should be. And of course if you're experiencing painful, dysfunctional breastfeeding and trying to cope with other children then you're going to struggle.
I appreciate that there are people who feel they can't cope and I can't argue with that, but I do think it's worth pointing out that there are lots of ordinary women, leading ordinary lives, who aren't 'supermums', who don't have lots of energy/time/help, and who have large families/work outside the home who DO manage to breastfeed and who don't see it as a big issue.
I just think the view that breastfeeding is only feasible for women with small families and loads of support needs to be challenged because it's simply not true. Yes - support makes a difference, but then support makes a difference to ALL new mums, breastfeeding OR formula feeding. The really intense time with bf only lasts a short time and most people muddle through - they just do. And then they reap the rewards later on, because once breastfeeding is established and babies are feeding less frequently there's no doubt that for most people it's easier than ff. There's also the consideration that bf babies as a group get sick less often and less seriously, and I don't know how other people feel, but I know that the thing that is most disruptive to my family life is children being ill. Anything that minimises this is good for me, good for my baby and good for the rest of the family.