>Dear Saara:

The stats are usually from analysis of the raw data.  In the US, most of
that analysis comes from looking at the Ross data which used to stratify by
education at least...and also I think they used to work WIC moms into the
data.  I assume that they still do this.

In the developing world most of the statistics come from the USAID
Demographic Health Surveys (DHS).  These surveys stratify by education and
rural/urban.  In general in the developing world, more educated women are
of higher social class.

To the best of my knowledge there are no studies as to "why" that is so,
but in the developing world, at least before BFHI, the aspiration of more
educated women was to be like women in the US and/or western Europe.  There
are references to this in Derrick Jelliffe  work, in Gay Palmer's work on
The Politics of Breastfeeding and in Penny Van Esterik's Beyond the
Breast-Bottle Controversy.

A great deal of responsibility must lie with western hospital births and
physicians influenced by "western" medicine.  The women who saw these
physicians, initially, were the wealthier, better educated women.

In my original notes from my fieldwork in Honduras in 1968, women
"complained" that they had difficulty introducing the bottle when babies
were 6 months old!  My mother-in-law gave bottles to my husband after two
months of age and he was born in 1937.  But she was modern, lived in a
"city" and gave birth with a doctor's help.  When we started our hospital
project, PROALMA, in 1983, we found that 75% of women introduced bottles in
the first month of life in the capital and 68% on the first day, in the
hospital.

As we worked on our breastfeeding program, urban women increased their time
breastfeeding dramatically (from average of 5 months to average of 12
months in the first two years of our project), while women giving birth in
rural areas dropped their average time slightly, but not
significantly.  Honduras had a pretty strong breastfeeding program
throughout the 80s and even today children with normal births do not
routinely receive bottles in public hospitals and something like 95-6%
initiate breastfeeding and even more in rural areas...

Women with higher education responded quite positively to the breastfeeding
promotion program, as I'm sure is true in the US as well... Perhaps in the
developing world, since the initial breastfeeding rates were higher and
there are no WIC programs it will be a little more difficult for the
educated women to "catch up" to women who were poorer and less educated and
without the resources to exclusively bottlefeed.

In our Honduras work, in 1996 (I haven't seen the newest stats yet) the
average duration of breastfeeding was about 14 months and it was about the
same among women with more than 7 years of education.  Average duration of
bf in the rural areas was about 18-19 months.

Don't know if that helps or not...

Judy

>




Judy Canahuati
520 Commerce Drive
Decatur, GA 30030
404-373-7396
email:mailto:[log in to unmask]

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html