I see the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) is going through one of its attacks of semi-hysterical sanctimony, although come to think of it hysterical sanctimony, parading as anguished concern, is pretty much its raison d’être — odd, really, for an organisation that claims to want to help women.

The reason for the latest intransigent outburst is that the NCT is absolutely obsessed with telling other people what to do with their own breasts and the model Jordan, aka Katie Price, although possessed of a fine pair, has had the temerity to be photographed bottle-feeding her baby in OK! magazine.

She uses SMA ready-made milk in disposable bottles, the kind that the hospital sends you home with. The formula’s logo is clearly visible in the photographs, one of which is positioned opposite an advertisement for SMA’s toddler formula. (“A total coincidence,” according to the brand. “We plan our advertising months in advance and obviously someone at the magazine thought it would be a good place to put the ad.”) So? So the NCT’s chief executive, Belinda Phipps, who presumably doesn’t get out much (“This is a very big issue indeed,” she said) was so incensed by the sight — the advertising of formula milk for babies is banned in this country — that she reported the outrage to the Food Standards Agency herself.

The normally sane charity Save the Children joined the NCT in referring the case to the Advertising Standards Authority and the Trading Standards service, saying the feature, and an advertisement for SMA “follow-on” milk (for older babies, ie not banned) was “a flagrant breach of the rules”.

I would have thought that Save the Children had bigger fish to fry, wouldn’t you? But whatever. The real “flagrant breach of the rules” is a celebrity baldly stating that she’s not really into breast-feeding, thanks all the same.

“I don’t want a baby drinking from me,” Jordan says with her customary bluntness in the interview accompanying the offending pictures. Of bottle-feeding, she said: “It’s brilliant. 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.”

Admittedly, this isn’t especially green of her, although the bottles in question are made of glass, not plastic. But what a blessed relief to hear someone speak up against the breast-is-best zealots. I’m with Jordan on this one: I bottle-fed all three of my children and never had an iota of regret about doing so.

The idea of breast-feeding makes me feel (a) bovine and (b) queasy. The idea of breast pumps makes me keel over. There you go. It’s just my subjective opinion, worth no more or no less than yours — but it’s an opinion that’s so frowned on in all quarters, from the National Health Service to the ghastly NCT to well-meaning middle-class mums, that most women keep quiet about holding it, as though it were shameful to bottle-feed your child. It isn’t.

What is shameful is the way in which so many women, encouraged by the NCT, feel they are a failure if they either don’t fancy breast-feeding or simply can’t manage it — and not everyone does manage it, what with mastitis and cracked nipples and the odd bit of blood mingling with the milk (although plenty are so indoctrinated that they try for far too long and end up harming their by now malnourished child).

Not everyone can cope with the idea of leaking in a meeting. Quite a lot of people like the idea of other people feeding their baby — husbands, lovers, grannies, aunties. Some people have perfectly legitimate issues around breast-feeding and sex. Some don’t.

The point is that all this is fine. Breast-feeding is marvellous if you can and want to do it. Hats off to them: 10 Brownie points and another 10 for the health benefits. Bottle-feeding is fine, too, especially if you believe that a happy, relaxed mother makes for a happy, relaxed child.

And yet, as is so often the case, what an individual woman chooses to do with her own breasts has become yet another stick for us to beat each other with: ooh, she bottle-feeds (and therefore sticks pins in kittens’ eyes in her spare time).

Ooh, she breast-feeds (and therefore will still be at it in five years’ time, like some loony hippie).

So what? Who cares? Whose business is it, other than one’s own? Ditto caesarean sections: does it not occur to any of these toxic, triumphantly judgmental people that the majority of women have c-sections for medical reasons, not because they are vain or aspire to being Victoria Beckham? That c-sections are a serious surgical procedure, not a walk in the park? I should know, I’ve had three. And yet even they are seen as the perfect excuse to sit in judgment on other women and to make them feel they can’t even do childbirth “properly”. Tell your first-time mother NCT group that you’ve had a section and they’ll all look (a) disappointed, quickly followed by (b) smug.

This is hideous: neither childbirth nor child-rearing is a competition: all that matters is that a child arrives healthy. And all that matters is that it grows and thrives, however it is fed.

This is not the Third World where there are all sorts of legitimate concerns about formula manufacturers’ conduct — not least that pushing formula onto women with no access to clean water creates cholera epidemics and other diseases.

Luckily for us, we live in the “first world” where we have choices and what we do — or do not do — with our own bosoms ought to be a private matter (plus, breast-feeding is a middle-class thing and there is something revolting about middle-class types banging on about breast being best to their ignorant, deluded working-class sisters. They know how to have children, too, amazingly. Leave them alone).

It all comes down to personal choice. Usually, when you have choice, you are allowed access to both sides of the picture. In the case of breast v bottle, only the former side is vocal — not just vocal, but horribly condemnatory with it: the unspoken assumption is that you only care about your child’s wellbeing if you get ’em out. But that’s just not true. And it’s unkind, to boot, to deliberately make women at a vulnerable time feel like abject failures within a few days of their giving birth.

Hooray for Jordan with her trays of SMA — and hooray for freedom of choice.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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