Like many parents, I wasn’t aware of the laws around the promotion of baby formula until I needed to buy it, to feed my pre-term, extremely hungry baby. I discussed the stigma with a friend who was also formula feeding. She had had a double mastectomy, so couldn’t breastfeed. Thus we discovered that advertising promotions for baby formula for use from birth up to six months is banned in the UK, owing to the belief they’ll discourage breastfeeding.
It was a shock, as modern women, to be subjected to such paternalistic laws around what we did with our bodies and how we fed our own offspring. It felt, and it still feels, supremely patronising that mothers are not to be trusted to make their own decisions, as though we are so brainless and easily dazzled that a supermarket promotion is enough to sway us into rejecting breastfeeding outright.
