It is, I am sorry to say, all too rarely that I have a sense of fellow feeling with the beautiful blonde celebrity, Jordan, but yesterday was an exception. That was when she got it in the neck from the National Childbirth Trust for appearing in OK! magazine, unashamedly bottle-feeding her baby, Princess Tiaamii.

In fact not only was she photographed with the child contentedly sucking from his bottle, she declared that she throws the bottles away afterwards. “It’s brilliant,” she says. “I have 20 crates of teats and bottles. I don’t have to sterilise or heat anything, you literally take the teat out, screw it on, and throw it away. I don’t care what people say; you don’t have to breast-feed. I don’t want a baby drinking from me.”

It was at this point that I felt something like awe for the woman. She was not only breaking the great contemporary orthodoxy about motherhood — that not breast-feeding is tantamount to child abuse — she was being environmentally unfriendly with it by throwing away her bottles. She could have admitted to a couple of abortions and people would have minded less. Much less.

As it is, the National Childbirth Trust lost no time in bringing a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about SMA, the formula milk company that placed an advertisement next to her picture. Indeed, Brenda Phipps, the chief executive of the NCT, was so incensed she took her copy of OK! to the Food Standards Agency in person to complain about the feature.

Now the NCT, together with Save the Children and Unicef, is launching a campaign to ban formula milk manufacturers from advertising follow-on milk formula for older babies. They are already banned from advertising formula for younger infants. The charities want mothers to lobby Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, to get the advertising regime changed.

Mothers, I fancy, have other, better things to do with the time they spend not breast-feeding. My younger baby, who is eight months old, would be an advertisement for formula milk if advertising were allowed — rude health, sturdy bones.

I too, in a different way, am an advertisement for the same product. For the past eight months I have not spent most of my time as a human version of Dairy Crest. I was able to return to work — admittedly in the undemanding environment of a newspaper office — indecently early, leaving the baby’s father to feed her from a bottle. And I can, similarly, delegate the baby’s night feed when I have to get up at five in the morning to get to work. Justus von Liebig, the 19th-century German chemist who invented infant formula, should be a feminist pin-up, a towering figure in the liberation of women from the constraints of their own biology.

Actually, that makes me sound like a fanatic, like the Maenads from the NCT, which I’m not. I don’t have anything against breast-feeding, for other people. I accept that breast milk is the perfect infant food, preferable to artificial substitutes. I was all set to breast-feed when my two children were born — I took as gospel what I was told about early breast milk being a kind of natural antibiotic and so I went ahead with it, with bottle feed as a back-up.

And it can be perfectly pleasant. There’s something rather engaging about the way the infant shakes her head vigorously before latching savagely on to the breast. And it’s rather sweet the way the baby tongue teases the nipple, presumably to get the most out of it.

After a week or two in my case, bottle feeding took over. It was less awkward, less embarrassing and it was handier. In the case of the second baby, that process was expedited when I got mastitis from breast-feeding and, rather excitingly, had to be taken off to hospital in an ambulance in the night to deal with incipient blood poisoning.

In giving up on suckling the baby after a week or two I was in fact replicating the situation of half the mothers in this country. After birth, three quarters of women breast-feed; a few weeks on, that figure has dropped to half. By six months, it’s just over one in five.

The NCT claims that this decision is influenced by unscrupulous formula feed manufacturers who advertise their milk for older babies in the hope that mothers will be lured into buying their milk for young infants too. They emphasise the £10 that manufacturers spend advertising infant formula for every pound the Government spends promoting breast-feeding. Perhaps, but the Government also has an army of hectoring midwives on its side.

It’s patronising to assume that women are so easily swayed by advertising that they’ll change their habits just because of it. Advertising is, in its way, free speech for commercial ends. Grown-ups can handle it – all we ask of manufacturers is that they don’t mislead us by making false claims. And every formula milk advertisement I’ve seen goes out of its way to emphasise that their product is an also-ran next to breast milk.

The NCT and the other charities say that they want women’s decision about breast-feeding to be based on factual information. Really? No one ever tells you in prenatal classes that breast-feeding can be interminable. You can spend all day and half the night at it, half an hour at a time. Try combining that with a return to work. It can be painful. It can alter the shape of your breasts for the worse. Does that matter? Yes, it does.

The real reason why women take to the bottle is that they have decided that, although breast may be best, formula is good enough. You get more sleep and you get your life back quicker. Jordan plainly prefers to keep her breasts for other purposes than feeding the baby — well, she’s only doing what lots of other women do, but don’t say.

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