Plenty of people are honest enough to admit it and I know several people who are very outspoken in their position. Two of them told me they were offended by the attempts of the hospital staff to persuade them to express and feed colostrum to their babies and they both refused. One of them thinks that breastfeeding is vulgar and disgusting and should not be done in public by anyone at all, she also believes that people with good manners would not breastfeed even in private.
I breastfed all my kids. I don't expect others to do so, although I don't understand why they don't want to since I have never had any negative visceral reaction to it. In fact, when my first child was born it was one of the things that I most enjoyed in our first moments together.
I don't think a woman can or should be forced to breastfeed, it is just one of many reproductive choices and I am pro choice. On the other hand, I do object to anyone telling a woman that she should not breastfeed, since it is by definition the natural way to feed any mammalian infant. (In the UK it's illegal to tell a woman who is nursing in public to stop.) I support any and all public health efforts to educate women on the benefits of breastfeeding, since the data in favor of breastfeeding are incontrovertible, and marketing against breastfeeding has been ongoing for generations.
Formula is a modern invention, it's been around for less than a century. But even before then, women in certain cultures were encouraged to put their babies out to nurse with wet nurses, in England and America it was considered a mark of the upper class (because only wealthy people could afford to pay such a nurse). Choosing not to nurse is a choice that well predates the introduction of baby formulae.
So no, you are not alone.
Edited:
Having read Jane M's post, I am compelled to elaborate on the genesis of both wet nurses and formula...I don't think it was because women didn't like to nurse or didn't want to, true choice and free will are a modern phenomenon. Rather, I think there were many big, societal forces at work...
...wet nurses have been around for a very long time, so I can't comment on them globally and in all cultures, but in the Victorian era, remember that women were still legally subordinate to their husbands, and that to a great extent the upperclass feminine ideal was weak and delicate. Women's sexuality was spuriously medicalized ("hysteria" was a diagnosis for which one treatment was clitoral manipulation by a physician...you read that right, it's shocking...and women took arsenic to maintain a pallid appearance.) In this context, ladies were expected to cede their infants to wet nurses so as to avoid too much physical taxation, not to mention the fact that they would be more easily impregnated sooner without the suppression of ovulation caused by nursing. In the meantime, if men wanted more sex than their handicapped wives could tolerate, they could just go see a prostitute. So, while it was a mark of affluence, it was also another expression of how men determined their women's sexual and reproductive agendas. Whether women at the time saw it that way or not is perhaps unknowable, it would require a PhD to read umpteen diaries searching for references that may not be recorded.
As for formula, early formulations met with limited success. It wasn't until Rosie the Riveter was needed in the war effort, that formula was extensively promoted to women and greated attention paid to the welfare of infants drinking it. It was a matter of patriotic necessity.
After that, two other factors: the medicalization of birth, and the women's movement, increased the momentum for the adoption of formula. My mother tells me that many of her friends delivered babies by scheduled C-section to accomodate the golf schedules of the doctor, and that women were encouraged to feed formula for reasons we now know are false. As for the women's movement, It's is certainly the case that formula decouples the needs for the infant from the schedule of the mother, and many women can work more hours, days and types of jobs if they don't nurse, thus promoting economic equality.
However, the preponderance of data breastfeeding is by far the superior way to feed an infant. It's a free country, but women who don't nurse should consider whether the reasons not to outweigh the health benefits to themselves and, of course, their children. Perhaps stepping back from it, however difficult, can help overcome the fear and aversion and at least lead to greater understanding.
I loved doing it, even when I was breathless from the shattered glass pain of blocked glands, or got bit by razor sharp little teeth. Even when I got sneers and stares from people who don't approve or understand. I didn't flaunt my breasts in public, I just fed my babies. It's just one of the ways I show my children that I love them very much. They can pay me back later, I want a push-up bra for Mother's Day.
