What do you think is the biggest barrier to breastfeeding In Australia?

[Smoke Jaguar]

Carly, it has been mentioned quite a few times here in this thread that we are talking about the people who CAN BF but don't They're the ones whose reasons could give us clues as to where the education needs to start, be directed etc. This thread is not intended to make anyone feel inadequate, it's asking a valid question. We need to be able to talk about so that it becomes less of a mystery for mummies.
I know of a woman who tried BFing for less than a week and went to formula because 'it hurt' to BF... as if it's a walk in the park for the rest of us! She had her second baby and didn't think twice, just put her onto formula and EBM - won't bother with actual breastfeeding because 'it hurts too much'. Everyone dances around her so as not to cause offence, so when I realised one day that I'd turned up to a get together wearing my 'I make milk...what's your superpower?' t-shirt, I felt like a walking criticism. Why? Why can't I be proud of what I do for my son? Why can't I be proud about getting through 4 excruciating weeks of tongue-tie, oversupply, grazed and bleeding nipples, humungous boobs? I DID feel like a superpower. And I refuse to condescend to women who don't BF, for whatever reason (as in, I feel it would be patronising to FFeeders to consciously cut it out of my conversation or talk it down whilst feeding DS, as if they need to be protected from real life!). I'm not going to second-guess their reasons, it's up to them. But at the same time, I'm not going to shrink away from the fact that I've done this magical thing for my boy, out of some misplaced guilt that someone else couldn't. Geez, that's like pretending I don't have a son when I know I'm going to be talking to someone who is dealing with infertility or miscarriage...or someone who has lost a child of any age.
Sorry, that's a bit of a tangent, but it IS related. We seem to feel the need to downplay how great it is to breastfeed in order to be inoffensive. We need to get past that or there are women who will miss out on that anecdotal evidence, they won't have that in the backs of their minds when they are going through that initial attachment period and other people's success stories won't get them through that because they won't have heard many. They'll be hearing an apologetic 'but it's just as fine if you feed formula'. Cos it's not. Formula can be fed instead of BM where it is not possible to feed BM, but it will never be anywhere near LIKE BM, and no amount of apologising is going to erase that fact.
That's what I mean about a rock and a hard place. Exalt Bfing and dump the guilts on FF mummies