After I arranged to meet Olivia Hinge in a pub in south London, where she works as a lactation consultant and NHS midwife, I came down with mastitis—an infection associated with lactating.
Unfortunately for me, the symptoms—shivers, nausea, fatigue, pain—make me feel too unwell to meet Hinge. Luckily for her, I don’t need to use our Zoom call (plan B) to pump her for medical expertise. Hinge’s advice has already saved me from the worst of this brutal infection many times. We’ve never met but I regularly find myself on her Instagram page, which has become the go-to resource for thousands of breastfeeding parents.
The UK has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world. The last nationwide survey, conducted in 2010 and now discontinued, found that only 1 per cent of mothers still breastfed six months postpartum, while the WHO recommends that children are breastfed up to (and even beyond) the age of two to protect them against many childhood illnesses, and to lower their risk of obesity and diabetes. Experts say the low rates are down to a lack of support and advice for new mothers, as well as “aggressive” advertising by formula brands and negative public perceptions of breastfeeding in public.
Hinge, who’s been a midwife for 12 years, trained to become a lactation consultant in 2019 after struggling to breastfeed the first of her three children. “Midwives are the experts of normality. When breastfeeding is going well we can help, but I realised the limitations of my knowledge,” she tells me from her living room, where she’s cradling her five-month-old.
She began working on her hospital’s infant feeding team, which she loved. But midwife shortages across England mean she currently works in the labour ward. “Breastfeeding isn’t prioritised—we’re firefighting at the moment.”
In lockdown, when post-natal support services were suspended, Hinge received requests from friends and family for breastfeeding advice. She made videos to send to anyone who needed help.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. “People were in their sitting rooms with their whole boob out, not feeling self-conscious.”
When lockdown eased, NHS lactation services didn’t fully resume. This inspired Hinge to take to Instagram to cover every area of lactation and newborn behaviour. She now has more than 40,000 followers, who have told her “incredibly concerning” stories of medical professionals giving uninformed guidance, advising people to stop breastfeeding when they don’t need to.
She would like every GP to have mandatory training on breastfeeding every few years. I ask if she thinks this could realistically happen. “Yes, if we [as a country] truly wanted to increase breastfeeding rates,” she says. “But we don’t.”
Unicef found that more support in this area could save the NHS at least £40m a year because of how breastfeeding protects against illnesses. But Hinge knows first-hand that there just isn’t the staff. “The reliance on volunteering sickens me,” she says. “This wouldn’t happen if it was a male domain.”
Hinge’s mission isn’t to promote breastfeeding, but to give people the information they need to make decisions. Women often stop breastfeeding because of a misconception that they don’t supply enough milk. “The way we feed our babies is much more than nutrition—it’s our feeling of self-worth in those first years of being a parent.”
And with such a crucial mission, Hinge can’t see herself stopping her Instagram.
“I don’t think I could stop and know there are people out there really struggling with breastfeeding, and that a simple message of advice could turn everything around for them.”
