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Claims that a couple breastfed their baby to death play to prejudices in a land where ‘breasts are for your husband, not your baby’ Now and again a story comes along that utterly confirms all our prejudices. This week it was France’s turn to wallow in the warm glow of I-told-you-so when vegan parents were accused of breastfeeding their child to death . All that was missing for the perfect flush of French prejudices was for the baby to have worn a hijab. Veganism is so way out in a country wedded to steak frites and four portions a day (of baguette) that the bizarre details of the case – such as the clay poultices the sickly child was treated with – went clean over people’s heads. Everyone, however, knows the dangers of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding destroys lives. It starts by robbing women of their most powerful weapons of seduction, then their style and then their feminine mystery. Before you know it your baby is sleeping in your bed, and you are carrying her around like an African villager and avoiding so many proper French foods that you may as well be doing Ramadan. Lovemaking and une vraie vie de couple becomes impossible, sending husbands running into the arms of their mistresses or gay colleagues who they can be sure will never turn into brooding sucklers. Breastfeeding – particularly after two or three months – is regarded in France as something akin to drinking your own urine. Strange foreigners may do it, but that is no reason a nation brought up to idolise Liberté in the form of Marianne’s perfect breasts should. As a gynaecologist reminded a friend of mine the day she confirmed her pregnancy: “Your breasts are for your husband, not your baby.” France has the lowest breastfeeding rate in the western world, a statistic that doesn’t look like it is going to change any time soon if its health system or its most-read feminist philosophers have anything to do with it. One of this year’s biggest bestsellers, The Conflict: The Woman and the Mother , warns that breastfeeding is a trojan horse rolling back the gains of the women’s movement and shackling women to “despotic, gluttonous babies who devour their mothers”. The philosopher Elisabeth Badinter argues that women must beat back their babies with bottles of formula milk and rigid feeding regimes if they are to retain their independence and their sex lives. You won’t be in the least surprised to learn that breastfeeding, like so many other grave threats to civilisation, was invented in America. You may think of La Leche League as a group of sleep-deprived hippies, but to Badinter it is the most powerful and nefarious lobby on earth, a coven of Catholic fundamentalists bent on using the World Health Organisation to turn back the clock to an unscientific patriarchal “naturalism”. French women, she claims, are being bombarded by the league’s breast-is-best propaganda designed to make them feel guilty for not overcoming their “disgust” at putting their babies to their breasts. If that is really the case, they are putting up remarkable resistance. By Badinter’s own figures, the number of French mothers still breastfeeding after six months is so negligible that it doesn’t even make the graph. Frankly, as my partner and I discovered, getting a mother out of a French maternity ward while she is still breastfeeding is something of a miracle. We were repeatedly told that we would never get our premature child home unless we gave it a bottle. Everyone agreed breast milk was best – in theory – but the hospital (one of the most advanced in the country) preferred if the mothers pumped their milk so it could be given to the babies by a gastric tube or by bottle, usually pasteurised. We gently resisted the offers of free formula (and the four baby milk posters in our room) and our daughter became known as le bébé au sein (the breastfed baby), such a freak of nature that France Télévisions wanted to make a documentary about how I carried her skin-to-skin, a standard practice for premature children for decades elsewhere. A psychologist, a diehard Freudian (as the law dictates all should be in France), later suggested that my partner breastfed because she was getting a sexual kick out of it. Most of our friends who do manage to breastfeed hit a wall at between four and nine weeks when their doctors tell them they don’t have enough milk, and they must pass to the l’étape biberon (the bottle stage). This peculiarly French phenomenon may have something to do with the fact that women are beginning to think about going back to work at that point, maternity leave being on average less than half of what it is in the UK. A paediatrician as good as confirmed this to me, claiming that he was doing women a favour by allowing them to rediscover their vie de femme . It is possible to work and breastfeed in France, although the only woman we know who dares to bring a pump to the office is a human rights lawyer who spends her days putting the fear of God into central Asian dictators and Algerian generals. Which is where fathers come in. Within days of my daughter’s birth, doctors, nurses and friends were reminding me of my primary duty as a père de famille – to couper le cordon , to cut the cord, and save my partner from turning into a mama-vache , une bovine , une tétine géante (a giant dummy), as one put it. She will get her perinea retrained to return her to peak sexual performance – a wonderful French tradition that is actually about preventing incontinence, and which the NHS would do well to copy – and my job was to make sure the baby did not get in the way of her vie de femme . In that, I am afraid, I have mostly failed as a French father. My daughter is, at 17 months, still a boob baby and we all sleep in the same bed. But that is our little secret, OK? I don’t want those documentary makers knocking on the door again, this time for one of the regular reports on weirdos who still allow a sneaky suckle at two or even three years of age! That, as one radio presenter said, is quite possibly sexual abuse. Breastfeeding France Parents and parenting Children Europe Health Fiachra Gibbons guardian.co.uk