A mum-of-one who suffered postnatal depression after the birth of her daughter claims pressure to breastfeed “brainwashed” her.
When Sue Haddon, from Guildford, fell pregnant with her daughter Rain, she and her husband Will Sykes had planned to approach parenthood in a “partnership.”
“We did everything together. Will is self-employed and he put away extra money so he could take more time off work when the baby was born,” Sue, 43, told The Mirror.
The pair wanted to be as equal as possible as parents and had planned for Sue to breastfeed the baby during the day while Will took on the night feeds using formula.
But as Sue’s pregnancy progressed she noticed the messages she was getting from doctors and midwives seemed to only focus on the option of breastfeeding.
“I was being given a very idealised picture of breastfeeding,” she said, adding she had a “growing sense of foreboding” about feeding her baby as her due date grew closer.
“The idea of exclusive breastfeeding just didn’t sit right with me,” she explained.
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Concerned about which option was best for their newborn, the couple decided to wait and ask their class leader on the National Childbirth Trust antenatal course they’d planned to take.
“We had a main instructor for three classes and then we had a breastfeeding session on top of that,” Sue explained.
But when Will asked the instructor about the possibility of shared feeding so he could give their baby a bottle at night, Sue claims the instructor dismissed the idea off the bat.
“She literally laughed in his face, it was very strange,” Sue recalled. “She said, ‘how will you be able to feed the baby at night? You’ll be going to work in the morning’.
“It was such an awkward moment. She ultimately closed down the topic and referred us to the breastfeeding specialist.”
When their breastfeeding session came around Sue and Will were invited to the lactation consultant’s house alongside several other couples.
“She was very welcoming and charming. She made us very comfortable and made us some tea. Then she split us into groups and asked us to write down our top questions about breastfeeding,” Sue said.
She recalled almost every couple asking about the possibility of shared feeding, using both breast and bottle.
“[The consultant] very clearly said, ‘no, that doesn’t work’.”
Sue added the consultant then cited “tropes of breastfeeding advocacy” to insist combination feeding wouldn’t work, including ‘nipple confusion’.
Nipple confusion is when an infant struggles to latch onto the breast after being fed with a bottle. However, various scientific studies have shown conflicting evidence as to whether or not nipple confusion exists and there is a long-running debate around the subject.
After Sue’s lactation consultant “shut down” any suggestions of combination feeding, she claims Will “disengaged” from the process.
But while he thought his wife was of the same opinion as him, Sue’s anxiety was spiralling.
She said: “I was late in the pregnancy and very vulnerable to these suggestions. I was really anxious to do the right thing for my baby.
“I was taken in by the idea that breastfeeding is connected to bonding and I had a moral sense that all good mums breastfeed.
“It sounds mad but in that late stage of pregnancy I left that class having had a total shift in what I believed.”
In the week leading up to giving birth Sue developed insomnia and her anxiety became more intense.
When she did eventually go into labour it lasted for five gruelling days before she gave birth to Rain at Kingston Hospital.
But even though the exhausted mum needed to rest, she became obsessed with getting Rain to do the breast crawl - which is when a newborn baby is placed onto their mum’s chest to find the nipple and begin feeding on their own.
“I’d been in labour for days, I’d had an epidural and I was just so confused,” she said.
Shortly after Rain was born, Will went home to get some sleep. But when he returned to the hospital a few hours later Sue was still wide awake.
After struggling to get Rain to latch on, she became more anxious. And while she had plenty of support from midwives and nurses, Sue claims their advice was “blinkered” - with no suggestion of giving the baby formula even though she wasn’t feeding at all.
“The nightmare just continued,” Sue said. “I continued not to sleep. She never latched on well even though I was constantly being helped.
“I knew it wasn’t working. I just thought ‘any minute now someone’s going to come and say this isn’t working’ and then we could try something else.”
But during her two and a half days in hospital after giving birth, Sue claims no one told her to try another option.
A spokesperson for Kingston Hospital NHS Trust said: “We always strive to provide the best possible care to women using the maternity service at Kingston, and we are sorry to hear about this experience.
“Whilst we cannot comment on individual cases, decisions about care are always made in consultation with women around clinical need and patient choice.”
When she was eventually discharged, Sue’s mental health was in a bad way and Rain wasn’t getting the nutrition she needed - which was picked up by a midwife on a home visit the following day.
“Rain had lost 13% of her birth weight and was becoming jaundiced. The midwife told us we had to take her back to the hospital,” she recalled.
The terrified parents rushed Rain back to A&E at the hospital where she’d been born just a few days earlier.
According to Sue, this was the first time a health professional had suggested feeding her daughter with formula via a bottle - as breastfeeding clearly wasn’t working.
“The nurse said to me, ‘we see this every day’,” Sue recalled.
“It’s a weird thing to say but that trip to A&E was a blessing in disguise. They were sensible and pragmatic and they could see I was distressed.
“Between us we came up with a plan to feed her formula and top up with expressed milk.
“When we got home I could finally sleep and we got into this routine and we basically ended up doing exactly what we’d planned to do before I’d gone to NCT classes.”
But while the initial panic was over, Sue felt lingering guilt over not breastfeeding her daughter and developed postnatal depression.
“I had this idea I’d failed at the first hurdle of motherhood,” she said.
Thankfully, Sue got the help she needed and recovered. She also researched the NCT and the baby-friendly initiative advice it followed.
Through her research Sue found other mums who were unhappy with their experiences with the NCT. In time she co-founded the Infant Feeding Alliance, which campaigns for health services to approach infant feeding advice in a way that is tailored towards each individual family, rather than pushing breastfeeding.
Looking back on her own experience, Sue says it’s ironic that the idea of breastfeeding was thrust upon her as a way to get close to her daughter, now four.
“These messy early experiences made it really difficult to bond with her, and having postnatal depression, I didn’t enjoy that time.
“But as I recovered I started bonding with my baby and actually enjoyed her.”
An NCT spokeswoman said: "Infant feeding can understandably cause so much stress and anxiety for parents, particularly in the early days. We feel very strongly that parents should be able to access high quality, person-centred support to feed their babies the way hey want to, and never be made to feel judged or guilty about the decisions they make.
“We are committed to supporting all parents, however they decide to feed their babies, whether by breast, bottle or a mixture of both. This means providing evidence-based, parent-centred and non-judgmental support – listening to, respecting and supporting parents.
"We're so sorry that Sue had this experience and hope she made us aware of it at the time. We ask parents to evaluate all our courses and we have a formal process in place which means we act on feedback and make improvements if parents feel that something isn’t right on a particular course.
“Overall the feedback is very positive, but we absolutely need to know about any issues, so we'd encourage them to let us know through the feedback process or through our Enquiries line if something needs to change."
