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Courtney Jung is the author of Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy and a professor at the University of Toronto

"Breastfeeding is the most important thing you'll ever do for your child." I heard that more than once when I had my daughter in 2005. As a brand new parent, I was consistently surprised by the strong opinions people felt so free expressing about such an intensely personal subject.

A friend's husband told me he couldn't respect a woman who didn't breastfeed. A nurse refused to sign off on my release from the hospital because she felt that I wasn't trying hard enough to get my daughter to latch.

My experience, I've come to learn in the years since, is hardly unique. In recent years, the imperative to breastfeed has reached a fever pitch that is out of all proportion with its potential benefits for mothers and babies.

But that - finally - may be changing. Earlier this week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published new guidelines on infant feeding, explicitly stating that health care providers should support a woman's decision about whether to initiate or continue breastfeeding.

This is an important milestone. A middle ground that supports a woman's own choice to formula feed or breast feed her baby has been a long time coming.

In the beginning, when the international breastfeeding advocacy group La Leche League first organized in the 1950s, they were a tiny minority up against a medical establishment that recommended formula feeding. And when Nestlé came under fire for aggressively marketing formula in countries where most mothers lacked access to clean drinking water, breastfeeding became a challenge against big business and corporate greed. Breastfeeding advocates were an embattled minority fighting against powerful and entrenched interests.

But gradually, the tables shifted. Breastfeeding became a feminist issue, a symbol of the power of a woman's body to sustain human life. For some on the Christian right, breastfeeding turned into a sign of the rightness of heterosexual marriage with different roles for men and women. And then in quick succession it became a key component of attachment parenting and an environmental issue.

By 2005, when my daughter was born, breastfeeding had not only made a come-back as a widespread infant feeding practice. It had also become a symbol of a wide range of commitments and beliefs – something parents did not simply practice, but believed in, and preached.

It also became big business: The global breast pump market, for example, is growing at more than 8 per cent annually, and will soon reach $2.6 billion (US) a year.

In the last decade, the pressure to breastfeed has mounted steadily. As I learned again when my son was born in 2011, that pressure comes not only from other parents, but also from hospitals, in the very vulnerable hours after a mother gives birth; from lactation consultants who insist - despite mountains of evidence to the contrary - that all women can breastfeed; and from breastfeeding advocates who have made a calculated decision to instill fear in women by touting the alleged risks of formula feeding rather than the benefits of breastfeeding.

That pressure has been exacerbated by a general sense that there is no harm in exaggerating the benefits of breastfeeding. But that is not true. A person who believes that breastfeeding will have a modest impact on the risk of infection, which it does, would probably agree that parents can reasonably weigh that impact against other things in their lives to reach a decision about the best way to feed their own baby.

But if we as a society generally buy into the shaky science claiming that breastfeeding will protect babies from everything from obesity to cardiovascular disease, it seems almost impossible not to draw the conclusion that feeding a baby formula is not only bad parenting but irresponsible citizenship.

For women who cannot breastfeed or who choose not to, that shame has been a terrible burden to bear. Thousands of women have gone online to express the anguish, shame, depression, and anger they experienced when breastfeeding didn't work out for them or when they decided that breastfeeding was not the right choice for them or their family.

For too long, breastfeeding advocates have insisted that women do not feel any pressure to breastfeed, or that their shame and anguish are exaggerated.

With these level-headed new recommendations - it appears that, finally those advocates are listening.

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