I don't want to write this article.

I don’t want to be a member of Friends of Breastfeeding or my local Cuidiu and La Leche League breastfeeding groups.

I don’t want to be someone who “breastfeeds”.

What I do want is to live in a world where there is simply no need for breastfeeding groups or breastfeeding articles or even the word breastfeeding itself, because feeding human milk to human babies is just normal, and no big deal.

I also want there to be no more intelligent, strong, beautiful mothers who feel guilty because they didn’t breastfeed their baby, or didn’t breastfeed for very long.

In our world – both the rich and the poor parts – in the early twenty-first century, some people have invested a lot of time, money and brain power into establishing the belief, on a global basis, that artificial feeding of human infants is the norm. When a group of people put that amount of resources into achieving something, the chances are good they will succeed, and these people succeeded incredibly well in establishing that belief.

No one person needs to feel bad that they subscribe or subscribed to that belief. Humans are social animals; we crave belonging and acceptance. History shows us that even the cleverest, strongest people are affected by societal pressures to do things they would not otherwise do, to believe things they would not otherwise believe. So anyone who feels guilty about not breastfeeding needs to stop right now.

But do feel anger. Feel anger at the vested interests that carefully trade on and nurture your guilt so they can sell you something. Feel shame that our society has been persuaded to devalue the most life-giving, precious resource of all: human milk. Feel rage that all over the world right now, including right here in the so-called developed world, are children who are ill with conditions that occur far less often in children who are given human milk.

There is another world in the future; I hope, not too far in the future. In that world, students of biology and anthropology will laugh themselves silly when they learn that for one brief stretch of time in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, human beings fed their babies an artificial product derived their babies a product egs in the Western world actualtfeeding group. from the milk of another animal. This period was a blip, they will be told, an aberration in human history. People in the early twenty-first century sure were backward, the students will say.

I fervently hope they will be able to say that.

Orla Shanaghy is an Irish writer. Her work has been published in The Sunday Miscellany Anthology 2008 – 2011, The Stinging Fly literary magazine and her work features regularly on the Sunday Miscellany show on RTÉ Radio One. She was shortlisted for the 2007 William Trevor Short Story Prize. You can find Orla on Twitter @OrlaShanaghy and her blog is at www.waittilitellyou.com.