New moms breastfed longer during the pandemic

By Cara Murez

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, May 22, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when stay-at-home orders were in place, new moms tended to breastfeed their babies about two weeks longer than usual. , shows new research.

“Stay-at-home policies allowed parents to continue breastfeeding at home instead of returning to the workplace,” said study co-author Dr. Rita Hamad, an associate professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, in San Francisco.

“This suggests pent-up demand for breastfeeding, which could be hampered by the lack of a national paid family leave policy in the US,” Hamad said in a university news release.

The pandemic workplace closures in March and April 2020 created a natural experiment to determine whether the ability of parents of newborns to stay home led to changes in breastfeeding patterns, according to the study.

Using national survey data and birth certificates from 2017 to 2020 from more than 118,000 postpartum women, the researchers examined whether and for how long the babies were breastfed. They studied the initiation and duration of breastfeeding for babies born before and after the shelter-in-place policies.

The researchers found that the rates of women who started breastfeeding their babies did not change. However, the duration of breastfeeding for women who initiated it went from less than 13 weeks to almost 15 weeks, an increase of 18%.

Race and income affected the result. White women had the greatest increase in duration at 19%. Hispanic women experienced the smallest increase, of about 10 percent, the findings showed.

While high-income women also experienced an increase in breastfeeding duration by approximately 19%, those with low income increased it by less than 17%.

The gains for white and upper-income women were likely due to these groups having jobs that could be more easily done at home, the study authors suggested. Hispanic parents were more likely to have lower-paying jobs that required them to work in person.

“Once again, the pandemic served to highlight an area of ​​health inequity: differences in workplaces that facilitate breastfeeding,” Hamad said.

Women continued to breastfeed their children longer until at least August 2020. Levels then dropped to what they were before the pandemic.

“Our study suggests that the duration of breastfeeding in the US would be longer and more comparable to that in other countries if working parents were paid while staying at home to care for their newborns, particularly parents of color and those with low-income jobs who cannot afford unpaid time off work,” Hamad said.

Initiation of breastfeeding for low-income and black families decreased during the pandemic, suggesting less access to breastfeeding support during shelter-in-place orders, according to the study authors.

The United States is the only high-income country without a national paid leave policy for new parents, the researchers noted. Only 25% of people working in private industry have access to paid family leave.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends six months of exclusive breastfeeding.

President Joe Biden said in March that he plans to allocate $325 billion in his 2024 budget proposal for a permanent paid family leave program.

The study was published online May 18 in the American Journal of Public Health.

More information

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about the benefits of breastfeeding for mom and baby.

SOURCE: University of California, San Francisco, press release, May 18, 2023