I live in Spain but belong to a British-based support group for breast-feeding mothers and through this group, I received the link to your website and the article about public breast-feeding (Daphne Caruana Galizia, TMID, 7 September).

I breast-fed my daughter for over two years in public and at home and never received any criticism and never felt that anyone was judging me in the way that the author of your article obviously judges breast-feeding mothers. I have always thought that parenting techniques, including whether one breast or bottle feeds a baby should be up to the individual parents and I think it is a shame that people like Daphne Caruana Galizia like to impose their views on others without presenting all the facts.

Of course, there are benefits to breast-feeding and benefits to bottle-feeding, depending on what kind of life you lead and what kind of routines you want your child to fit into.

One huge benefit of breast-feeding that Ms Caruana Galizia did not point out is the boost to the child’s immune system. From personal experience, I found that my daughter was never ill as a baby. Perhaps this was genetic but I believe that the immune-system boost she received from my breast-milk prevented her from suffering from any of the stomach upsets that other children her age suffered from.

I’m sure that the author’s comments that genes are vitally important to a child’s development are well-founded, but it is also well-known that as humans, we need to eat a healthy balanced diet to be physically and mentally at our best. If that is not simply down to genes, then surely the first milk that we give our babies must have an impact too.

As I read the article, I felt that some of the comments were very over the top and assumed that they were being made to shock. It says that breast-feeding a baby is not compatible with modern urban living, something I would dispute as I live in a town and not a mud hut, yet have successfully breast-fed.

The author finds mothers breast-feeding in public “annoying” and “off-putting”. If breast-feeding mothers are annoying her, surely she could move away from them or avert her gaze until the child has stopped feeding. I wonder what the author is doing when out in public to get her so distracted by these mothers.

Is she sitting next to breast-feeding mothers in cafes while at the same time trying to write her articles for The Malta Independent? Maybe she would be better off going to sit in a library where mothers are less likely to be breast-feeding (from experience, I know it’s generally best not to take babies into quiet places because whether they are hungry or not, they will probably make a noise and whereas a cafe is an acceptable place to make noise, perhaps a library is not).

I think it is good that Malta is trying to encourage women to breastfeed and I hope that articles like this one don’t put people off. I think that in western society nowadays, people have accepted bottle-feeding as one of the norms and there is no need for articles like this to exaggerate the point.

Factual presentations of the pros and cons of what milk to feed your baby and of what solid foods to offer when weaning would be far more useful to parents than articles such as this one, which suggest that breast-feeding in public is not normal. I have only ever received positive comments from people when I have been breast-feeding in public and I hope that there are other people in Malta who will be willing to offer support to breast-feeding mothers rather than encouraging them to stay at home or give the baby a bottle if they want to go out.

It also struck me that it really seemed to be the advertising that most upset Ms Caruana Galizia. The presentation of breasts and bottoms for all to see. Does she never go to the beach in Malta? Or to a local swimming pool? Maybe she has never seen another woman in a bikini and is shocked by all that flesh on display?

I wonder what reaction the author will have if one day, she becomes a grandmother and finds that her grandchild is to breast-fed. Will she find that annoying and off-putting? Will she make sure she is never in the same room as the baby when it is feeding or will she just wait until it has been weaned before she goes to see it?

It will be interesting to see whether your paper publishes a pro breast-feeding article in the future.

Laetitia Nunny

Barcelona,

Spain