If you had any doubt that the tendency towards fundamentalism and the control of women exists in every society, and that what Islamic extremists have done is take it to the extreme using religion as an excuse, all you have to do is observe closely what our very own home-grown Breastfeeding Nazis are up to.

Of course the mad campaign (as though there are no truly pressing matters to be getting on with) to hound and bully women into breastfeeding and make them feel bad or useless if they won’t or can’t is not about health but about misogyny. Birth and its immediate aftermath remind us that we are essentially animals despite our clothes and high-flying jobs and beautiful homes and university degrees, and the fundamentalists insert themselves into this breach in the walls of female emancipation and make the most of it. The woman who has just given birth, and who has been reduced already to the status of an animal by all that goes with it, needs to be treated with even greater civility and more reminders that she is a person and not further reduced to animal-like status by a bunch of bossy-boots poking and prodding at her chest like vets with a horse. Yet this is the very psychological state of which the fundamentalists seek to take advantage.

It is no coincidence that this freakish obsession with welding infants to their mother’s teats for two years – certainly, not only in Malta – began with the sea-change in cultural attitudes and laws that gave women the freedom and autonomy of which they had been deprived for centuries. The more autonomy and freedom women have obtained, and the more we have done with it, the higher, louder and more persistent the shrieks from the Breastfeeding Nazis have become. Again, this is not just in Malta but as usual, Malta is late to the party.

“But many of them are women too,” I hear you say. Yes, but then so was much of the crowd that stood about in morbid relish and spite to watch other women burned at the stake for witchcraft and sorcery. Some of the world’s worst misogynists are women. They actually derive some kind of unpleasant satisfaction from banding with the men to help make the lives of other women a misery and to keep them under control.

Now breastfeeding a newborn for the first few days for that important colostrum is not enough. No, now we have to breastfeed our babies for two years on demand, or even longer “if mother and baby are comfortable with it”. Baby? We’re talking about breastfeeding toddlers here. In a civilised world that is not a medieval village or a present-day third-world hamlet, and where proper food is available and should be eaten by two-year-olds if only because they need to be socialised and learn how to behave, breastfeeding at that age is an affectation (some would even say a perversity) which does harm in other ways and no discernible good.

But you can see the advantages to those who wish to control women and make their lives impossible. If a woman is tied to breastfeeding an infant for two years or even for just one year, doing anything else becomes so difficult that she doesn’t even try, or tries and then gives up. She is reduced to the sort of being that chauvinists and fundamentalists prefer: a human home-appliance who can’t go out except with a baby attached, who can’t earn money, who can’t (often) even take a shower when she needs to. The formerly independent woman is once more totally dependent on others for money, for help, sometimes even for her own food, because when you have a baby feeding on demand and latched to your nipple for hours on end, you can be sitting there starving and can’t get up to make a sandwich in case you disturb the feed which the Breastfeeding Nazis have told you is so important.

Health Secretary Chris Fearne has now joined in and told his audience at a meeting that the government will implement a ban on advertising infant formula milk “by agreement with distributors”. If no such agreement is reached, then the ban will become law. “I hope we won’t be forced to enact a legal notice and send wardens to patrol doctors’ clinics to make sure that breast milk substitutes for mothers of infants under six months of age are not being advertised,” Fearne said. “But if need be, we will enact legislation to enforce it.”

This is fascism, and like all fascist policies and thinking, it is illogical. If something is bad for children, then you don’t ban its advertising, but you ban it outright. What Chris Fearne is saying here is that infant formula milk is so bad for babies that advertising it is going to be banned, but despite its badness, it’s OK to give it to babies if there is no breast milk available. The only other such advertising bans are on tobacco products and slot-machine parlours/casinos, so infant formula milk is being put in that league of badness.

The lack of logic stretches further, and underscores the point that this is all about the control of women. Any dentist and paediatrician (and Chris Fearne is one himself) will tell you that the real harm being done to toddlers and young children is by fizzy carbonated drinks of which they are given great quantities by their parents. The damage being done by fizzy drinks in terms of obesity, general lack of health and rotted teeth is far greater, and immediately quantifiable, than the damage being done by infant formula milk (for which no evidence exists except controversially). Some dentists gave a big interview to a newspaper a couple of weeks ago to point out how bad the situation is.

So here we now have a crazy campaign to bully women into breastfeeding their infants to avoid obesity and because “it is better” (better for whom, exactly?) which completely ignores the fact that all these jolly breastfed Maltese infants will segue seamlessly from breast milk to large bottles of cheap cola given free with purchases over X amount at most discount supermarkets. But I don’t hear Chris Fearne and his army of fascists saying anything about that. Nor do I see any doctors standing up to be counted by pointing out the rampant inconsistencies in the Breast Fascists’ line of argument – especially in this regard – and the fact that they are doing real harm by creating misery for others.

A spokesman for the mental health association stood up at that meeting and timidly suggested that perhaps we should bear in mind that women harried into believing they have failed to breastfeed are prone to depression. He was immediately mown down (politely). Perhaps it’s time for the professionals who have to deal with the consequences of all this madness – including the wonderful progression from breast milk to cola, fat and rotted teeth – to speak out and help drown out the fascist noise of Fearne and his league of Breast Bullies.

Doctors and other health professionals have spoken to me privately about this matter. That’s useless, because it looks as though it is only me (not a health professional but an experienced mother with 30 years of access to an extended network of women and babies) who is pointing out the lunacy of what is happening, how wrong it is, and what damage it is doing to women and their babies, to say nothing of the disruption to their families and households. If you are a health professional and have a different opinion to that of the Breast Fascists, just speak out – in public. Or are we now afraid of upsetting Chris Fearne?

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