The United States is currently experiencing a dire shortage of infant formula. In response, I hear some people say “let the moms breastfeed!”

I’m guessing these backseat drivers don’t know that once a nursing mother stops breastfeeding, she cannot start up again.

I’m also guessing they don’t know how hard it is right from the start.

Take it from me. As a white, healthy woman with every advantage, including a home in the suburbs and a husband’s support, I was still a breastfeeding failure.

Our two children grew up just fine — on formula. They’re now both in their 20s, working and traveling around the world. But we had a rocky start.

My first-born was only a few weeks old when I realized that breast-feeding just wasn’t going to work for us.  “It’s supposed to be so simple!” I wailed.  “COWS can do it!”  But not apparently, me.

I had tried and tried, and so had my baby — on our own, with experts and with awkward and bulky equipment — and we had gotten nowhere.  Only 30 days into motherhood, and I had failed him at the most basic level: mother’s milk.

This was not in my plan. I meant to breastfeed. I subscribed to all the theories: that it is the easiest option — with no bottles to make, sterilize or wash;  the cheapest — no formula to buy;  and the healthiest — all the antibodies and nutrients your baby needs, miraculously blended for every stage of their young life.  Plus, it’s psychologically best for you both as well.  Just clap baby to bosom and bond.

There are just a few things the theories leave out.

No. 1: You have no idea what you’re doing.
Neither my mother nor my mother-in-law had any advice for me, and the hospital nurses were far too busy.

No. 2: It hurts.
My toothless infant, 6 hours old, clamped down hard enough to make me scream.  Convinced  I must be doing something wrong, I rang for the lactation consultant.  “Oh no,” she said, “if you can uncurl your toes after the first 30 seconds, you’re doing it right.”

No. 3: Sometimes there’s nothing there.
The milk doesn’t always arrive when the baby does — a design flaw, as my husband the engineer likes to say.

Worst of all, you must repeat the cycle, every two hours.  Or more often, if the baby can’t tell time yet.

Whose idea was this?   Nine months of increasing sleeplessness and “discomfort,” which means pain, capped off by either labor or surgery — or for the lucky few both. Then just when you are at a lifetime low and could sleep for a week, you have to breastfeed?

For me, this was sufficient proof that God is NOT a woman.   In fact, breastfeeding was the biggest disappointment of my life — even worse than finding out that the chocolate Easter bunny is hollow.

Of course, we’d had more than our fair share of problems. First, my baby had jaundice; then after my medically necessary C-section, I ran a high fever — possibly Toxic Shock — putting me back in the hospital in the ICU on intravenous antibiotics for a week.

Then the baby had his own (low) fever, requiring a spinal tap and his own weekend in the hospital on antibiotics. I had tried to pump breastmilk all through my ICU stay, but I hadn’t pumped enough — foolishly choosing to sleep instead — so by the time we got back together, his demand for milk was zooming just as my supply was packing it in.

But I was determined, so we went to consultants, who gave me a contraption to wear every time he nursed to teach us both what to do. I had to hang a flask of formula around my neck, with angel-hair-pasta-sized tubes leading from it, taped onto my boobs.  It reminded me of those “beer hats” they wear to baseball games — except I was the beer  and the hat.

The first time we tried, it was a disaster.  The second time was even worse.

I wanted to scream with anger misery, and frustration.  But someone else was already doing that, and I was supposed to be the grown-up in the room.

I took off the harness and made him a bottle of formula.

It was a huge relief, knowing he was getting enough to drink, and our relationship instantly became much healthier.  Feeding my baby became just one of many things I did, along with burping him, changing him, even — oh yes, — playing with him. All things I hadn’t thought of, in the depths of my misery.

But I never thought the stores could just run out of formula.

And what I never would have believed is that in a nation where Republican legislatures are rushing to FORCE pregnant women to have babies they don’t want— there could be 192 Republican members of Congress who voted “No” to giving the FDA enough money to fix the baby formula shortage.

These Republicans say they are “pro-life” — but they’re apparently just fine with letting babies starve to death once they’re born.