Impact of Prenatal Education on Breastfeeding Initiation Among Low-Income Women

To determine whether participants in the Baby Talk prenatal education program were more likely to initiate breastfeeding than nonparticipants.

Retrospective cohort study comparing women with a singleton pregnancy who were enrolled in Baby Talk with matched controls based on zip code, maternal age, race, language spoken, and payer source.

Urban Midwest county.

Baby Talk participants enrolled between November 2015 and December 2016 (n = 299) and matched controls identified through vital statistics records who were not enrolled (n = 1190).

A 12-hour prenatal education curriculum with 2.5 hours of breastfeeding content.

The primary outcome was breastfeeding at hospital discharge as reported in vital statistics.

Likelihood-ratio χ² and Fisher exact test were used to test the significant association between categorical variables.

Baby Talk participants were significantly more likely to initiate breastfeeding (93.65%) than matched nonparticipants (87.48%; P = .003). Non-Hispanic white and black Baby Talk participants were more likely to initiate breastfeeding than controls (96.15% vs 89.83%; 91.03% vs 77.02%, respectively; P < .05).

Prenatal education has the potential to increase breastfeeding initiation among low-income women, especially non-Hispanic white and black. This study is limited as participants were from a single community, though Baby Talk was offered at 5 separate locations, and potentially from information bias as it was reliant on the accuracy of vital statistics data.