TO PROMOTE National Breast-Feeding Awareness Week, on Monday Charlotte Church joined a campaign by the Welsh Assembly to promote breast-feeding among young mothers. Elsewhere, a new study showed that breast-feeding halves the risk of rheumatoid arthritis in women. There was also a disturbing story revealing that one in four top restaurants would ask a woman to leave if she began breast-feeding her baby.

The resulting headlines raised an important question. Why is an act so natural, and so good for mother and baby regarded with something approaching disgust?

I can understand this at one level. I breast-fed both my babies for two and four years respectively. Now my sons are teenagers, they would rather die than have me reveal this in their presence. It's up there with admitting that they are Take That fans or secretly fancy Fiona Bruce.

Breast-feeding is free, protects against obesity (mother and baby) and has a zillion other health benefits. Yet rates of breast-feeding are lowest among poor, white women under 20, with those persisting beyond six weeks almost non-existent. Quizzed about it, they - and their partners - say that though they know it's best for baby, there's something dirty and immoral about it. In any case, bottle-feeding allows others to look after their baby.

The reasons for this probably go back to the Fifties, when bottle feeding became aspirational. Cow & Gate formula had a crown on the tin because royal babies used it. In developing countries, its use is seen as a demonstration that you have risen above the common herd. In fact, the success of formula milk generally might partly be put down to our wish to believe that we have moved beyond something so, well, animal, as suckling our young.

And then there is the sexualisation of breasts. If breasts are associated with sex, and not babies, it can lead to embarrassment and resentment that someone should be so bold and impertinent as to whip out their breasts in public. It's odd, because mothers who feed their babies in public go to enormous lengths to do so discreetly. My eldest nearly died of suffocation as I tried to feed him surreptitiously under a coat in high summer.

Breast-feeding mums are not militant boob-baring earth mothers out to embarrass others. They do not want to make a big thing of it. But they need breast-feeding to be seen as normal, not abnormal. If society congratulated women who breast-fed, rather than made them feel it was something shameful, and if more women led by example, breast-feeding might become the automatic choice once more. It would be a great gift to the next generation.

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