Breast is Best Down South

BREAST-feeding is more fashionable down South than up North, according to new figures for 2012-13 reported in The Observer last Sunday. These figures suggest that in 2012-13, 327,048 women were not breast feeding their baby at all by the time they had their six to eight week check-ups. That represents just under half of all maternities. This is the first time breast feeding has fallen since the Department of Health began to collect and releasing the statistics in 2004.

PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN WHO INITIATED BREASTFEEDING:

Top five areas -                                           
Haringey Teaching PCT.......... 94.7%      

Wandsworth PCT................... 92.2%    

Lambeth PCT......................... 92.2%    

Westminster PCT.................... 91.5% 
  
Camden PCT.......................... 91.0%

Bottom five areas -
Hartlepool PCT.................... 39.4%

Knowsley PCT..................... 44.3%

Blackpool PCT..................... 51.0%

North Tees PCT.................... 51.9%

Liverpool PCT...................... 52.0%

The Observer journalist, Daniel Boffey, reports on a woman, Claire Jones Hughes, who was challenged by fellow diners in a cafe that she should be more discreet when breast feeding her four-month-old daughter. Mr Boffey adds 'this was [in] affluent, liberal Brighton' not among the natives of the North. Another customer backed Claire up saying: 'get into the 20th Century', and later Claire took a stand on the internet organising a 'flash-mob' of 60 mothers who took to the streets and fed their young-uns under the town's clock tower.

It's strange isn't it that today it is the posh southerners that believe 'Breast is Best' and flaunt themselves in public as the breast milk flows and the multitude lactates? I'm old enough to remember after the Second World War, when the Proletarian mothers up North used to do the same thing on the 17 Bus. Not only that but my wife, I and our six-month-old son, when in Spain in March 1964, shared a train carriage with Spanish soldiers bound to serve General Franco in Ceuta and other Spanish passengers on the then 24-hour journey it took to crawl from Albacete to Algerciras, and we all laughed and joked as the red wine and potato omelet were passed round the carriage as our son suckled on my wife's breast like a young goat. Children in Spain at that time were still young enough to be on the breast at six months old. Indeed, there were reports in some parts on the country that kids up to school age would still sample their mother's breast milk.

About that time in the 1960s, while boys in Spain would stop playing football to grab a quick mouthful of their mother's milk, the newly affluent middle-class women in England were putting their children on the bottle as soon as they could.  For them the bottle became the new wet-nurse for the lower-middle-classes, but now it is the other way round and studies show that affluence in an area is a strong indicator of whether breast-feeding is taken up.  The tendency is also for white women to breast-feed less than those of minority ethnic groups.  Southwark and Lamberth, London boroughs with big ethnic minority communities, have the third and forth highest propotions of women who continue to breast-feed after two months, 81.8% and 76.6% respectively.  Yet, in Hartlepool Councillor Cath Hill, who is involved in children's services, says that while she regards breast-feeding as 'the most natural thing in the world, in Hartlepool breast-feeding is seen as unnatural and abnormal'.

There's nowt so queer as folk!