Emma Cowing: The 'Breastapo' need to lay down their arms

This week, singer Myleene Klass risked the wrath of the Breastapo by speaking out against the pressure piled on new mothers to breastfeed.

"I breastfeed for my family, not to pacify the Breastapo," she said in an interview. "I think people should be very careful when it comes to judging how others raise their children. Aren't we all just doing the best we can? Besides, you never know what a person's circumstances are."

Klass is absolutely right. We don't. But none of that matters to the Breastapo. Indeed, the problem with the Breastapo is that they don't just breastfeed their own babies, they demand that everyone else do it too. In their narrow world view, any new mum who doesn't breastfeed is a failure, a poor excuse for a mother, a woman who has failed somehow because they are unable to give their child the best - rather than the best they can.

I have heard stories from friends of hectoring nurses on maternity wards, of unsympathetic healthcare workers and midwives who, many feel, bully them into attempting to breastfeed. For many women, giving birth is a highly traumatic process. New mothers are exhausted, overwhelmed and vulnerable. The last thing they need is someone in a starched apron screeching at them because they're "not doing it right".

For some women, breastfeeding is exceptionally hard. Not all women can produce enough milk to feed their babies, and many push themselves to the brink of sanity in the attempt to do so, partly because of the pressure piled on to them by the Breastapo. The Department of Health recommends that all children are breastfed for the first six months. This one-size-fits-all view allows little room for flexibility for those who struggle or indeed - whisper it - wish to make their own choices. Meanwhile, breastfeeding rates in Britain remain among the lowest in Europe, with only 45 per cent of infants exclusively breastfed a week after birth.

No-one would dispute that breast is best. It is. But equally that does not mean that women should be forced to make a choice that is not right for them.

Many members of the Breastapo are prone to pointing at history in an attempt to demonstrate that in the past, in the days before bottled milk was available, "all" women breastfed. This is simply not true. Wet nurses were common as a substitute for mothers who could not breastfeed their own babies, while the high infant mortality rates that existed in previous eras suggest that many women could simply not produce enough milk to keep their babies alive.

I am not a mother. But I hope to be one day, and, in the meantime, I still have breasts and I am still a woman, and as more of my contemporaries become mothers themselves, the topic of breastfeeding is one I spend more and more time discussing.I have friends who have bottle fed their children, and friends who have breastfed them. For them, breastfeeding is a hugely intimate and private decision, and one that no woman arrives at easily.

I have watched friends agonise over the question of whether or not to continue to try breastfeeding their child when the situation is making both child and mother desperately unhappy. I have watched others take the difficult choice of not breastfeeding a second child, after the disaster of breastfeeding attempts with a first.

In a world where we are increasingly told what to do, what not to do and, sometimes, even how to think, surely we can allow mothers to make the decision of what is best for both them and their own child?

Yes, every child must be protected by the state. But that same state - and that same army of white clad experts - should be working with, not against, every new mother out there. If you ask me, it's time for the Breastapo to lay down their arms.