Jayne Dowle: Please, Mr Cameron, don't tell mothers like me how we should feed our babies

Excuse me if I'm not jumping up and down with joy. And before the irate letters start flooding in, I know all about the health benefits of breast-feeding your baby for as long as possible. I've got two children, now aged eight and five, so I've had the talks, the support and all the information about allergies and obesity and immune systems. It's just that I am one of those mothers, and I know I am not alone, who found it extremely difficult to feed her babies herself. And I really resent politicians adding to the pressure.

I tried so hard with Jack, my oldest child, and was so terrified of disobeying my "breast at all costs" midwife, that he developed severe jaundice, exacerbated by lack of fluid, and almost died of dehydration. That's not a scare story by the way. I'm all for breast-feeding. If you can do it, enjoy it. It's the best thing you can do for your precious one, as my sister and many of my friends have proved.

In fact, despite my horrific experience with Jack, rushing him into Accident and Emergency collapsed like a rag doll, I did try again with my daughter. I really wanted to conquer my fear. But we struggled for about a week before I noticed Lizzie turning yellow and sleepy. I wasn't going there again. My husband, out shopping, rang to see if we were OK. When he heard the catch in my voice he said, "don't worry, I've already bought the formula", and that was that.

I thank my stars that I've got two healthy children, who have no allergies as far as I am aware, and seem to suffer few colds or tummy troubles. The only time I ever think about whether I did the right thing is when Jack's ears hurt at loud noises. Some studies show that severe jaundice in newborns can create hearing problems.

I just wish I had listened to my mother, and my own instinct and given him a bottle. But you live and learn. The simple point is, if you can't breast-feed, or it's not satisfying your hungry baby, then you should be allowed to make a choice without being made to feel guilty.

And that choice should be yours alone. So why does this most personal of decisions have to become such a political issue? For goodness sake, even Ed Miliband has been lambasted for admitting that his newborn son, Samuel, is fed on Aptamil milk. Call me a cynic but the timing of Cameron's policy announcement, coming so quickly after Milband's Aptamil moment, looks a bit suspect.

Whatever the reason, there are rules and regulations against "advertising" baby formula, but it was going a bit far for one breast-feeding campaigner to demand that the BBC should never have broadcast his admission. Last time I looked, we lived in a free country. Why do parents have to be coerced into following orders? It makes you wonder how any of us are supposed to develop responsibility for bringing up our own children.

Let's be realistic. We're living in tough times. I'm sure that this edict is the last thing bosses want to pay for right now. Surely, with economic slowdown and redundancies, they have enough trouble with their budgets already.

Will they face litigation from angry mothers if they refuse to co-operate? And more importantly, have you seen the state of your typical office kitchen? Some of them could sell the mould growing in the fridge as a cure for tropical diseases. My heart truly sinks as I picture the breast-feeding area shoved into a corner between the loo and the microwave. And I can just imagine how this idea would go down with the non-parents in the workplace. Yet another wedge to drive between them and those with children.

I bet Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary charged with steering the public health White Paper through Parliament, is really chuffed. Hasn't he plenty to do already without worrying about breast-pads? Such as the entire dismantlement of the NHS, public spending cuts and the small matter of teaching GPs how to be accountants.

And come on, after the child benefit debacle, this is so obviously being offered up to prove the new government is family-friendly. Anybody who thinks that the Prime Minister is doing it purely out of the goodness of his own heart has to be seriously deluded. I suspect the hand of his own dear wife in this, not to mention the Mumsnet brigade, the middle-class women he believes he can't afford to ignore, some of whom contributed most vociferously to the hard time Ed Miliband got for his bottle-feeding "sin".

Yet again, the Prime Minister proves how dangerously out of touch he is with the rest of us. He shouldn't presume to know what we are thinking, and he shouldn't attempt to tell us how to think.