The new parliamentary secretary for health launched a “two month consultation process on a national breast-feeding policy” yesterday. And when I read about it in the news, I thought that surely there must be far more pressing problems for Chris Fearne to be getting on with. Once again we are told that all this is happening because Malta has the lowest enthusiasm for breast-feeding in the whole of Europe, and so Maltese mothers are going to be hectored – yet again – about the wisdom of breast-feeding their children for a solid six months and then intermittently for the 18 months after that.  Oh, and they also want the same women to work, and the short news reports made a point of saying that yes, it is quite possible to breast-feed your child for two years and still hold down a job.

Possible, perhaps, but certainly not advisable – and I have had it up to here with the bossy breast-feeding bullies, who pop out of the woodwork every few years with their campaigns, going on endlessly about what is best for baby while treating the baby’s mother as some kind of functional object. What about what’s best for the mother? Mothers of new babies already have enough on their plate physically, psychologically and emotionally without being subjected to this barrage of bullying and guilt. They should be told the truth: that there is absolutely nothing wrong with bottle-feeding your baby unless you live in a village in the Third World, without running water or proper hygiene. There is nothing wrong with breast-feeding your baby for just a few weeks and then getting on to the bottle and normal life. If you live in the first world, you can bottle-feed your baby and it will grow tall, strong and intelligent all the same, or stay small, weak and stupid regardless, because it’s the genes which shape that and not breast over bottle or the other way round.

The weakest argument for bullying mothers into breast-feeding their babies for ever is that it boosts the child’s immunity. What they don’t tell you is that this so-called immunity boost is only for the duration, and that the immunity boosted is against boring routine stuff like runny noses and colds. Breast-feeding your child won’t stop it getting smallpox, but we’re in the first world so it won’t be getting smallpox anyway.

The way the needs, health and sanity of new mothers are ignored or treated as a side issue in these campaigns is truly offensive. Having a baby seems to reduce the status of a woman to that of a perambulating womb, a half-object who exists solely to keep her baby alive. That may be her sole purpose in biology, but now we are civilised and should adapt our attitudes accordingly. With so many women at risk of post-natal depression to varying degrees, the last thing they should be subjected to is yet more stress and guilt about breast-feeding. If a woman is at risk of post-natal mental health issues, the idea that all she needs is a bit of support and then she can breast-feed is totally off the wall. The last thing a woman needs when she is at her most vulnerable, feeling depressed and out of control, her life no longer her own, feeling and being treated like a life-support machine for an angry new baby, is to be surrounded by a plethora of health-visitors and helpful nurses ‘encouraging’ her to breast-feed. In that situation, heap praises on the bottle and get the woman back to normal life as soon as possible, for the health, safety and sanity of the entire household, not least the baby.

Women with babies are people, too. We so often forget this. And women with babies, especially if it is the first one and born, as it tends to be nowadays, after long and careful planning, tend to treat their child like a project which they must get perfectly right. They study things and read mountains and check and double-check and worry and stress out – and it affects them and affects the baby. Neurosis is immensely contagious from mother to child, and that’s one thing prolonged breast-feeding is likely to exacerbate rather than boost immunity against. Children who are breast-fed until they begin going to toddler-school have massive detachment issues and drive their mother bananas. They are often so indelibly bonded to the mother in a seriously bad way that even their other parent is viewed with hostility.

Is this a good thing – a woman who can’t go anywhere because a child who is already walking and talking begins howling and screaming for a suckle? A woman who is slowly driven mad because she has no time and space for herself, because she has become an extension of her child rather than the other way round? A child who cannot develop normally and socialise with other adults in the absence of the mother because the breast has momentarily disappeared, provoking major anxiety?

“It’s natural,” we’re told. Well, actually, it’s not. Where in nature has there ever been a woman with just the one child aged almost three and still suckling, with the bond between mother and only child being one based on mutual separation anxiety, rather than women with a gang of children born a year or so apart, with the oldest looking after the youngest, and the mother not knowing most of the time where all but the very youngest are, and then only because the youngest is strapped to her back?

It’s time to stop all this nonsense. Let women bottle-feed in peace and without hectoring if that is what they want to do and what they know to be right for them and for their child. It’s nobody else’s business. The nanny state can be taken way too far.