The Impact of Federal Breastfeeding Policy Initiatives on Women’s Breastfeeding Practices and Attitudes in Southern Indiana

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effects of a change in WIC federal policy for low-income mothers and children at nutritional risk in southern Indiana. The policy change was meant to encourage more WIC recipients to exclusively breastfeed their infants. However, most recipients reported that the change in policy did not influence their infant feeding decisions in the way that policy makers intended. Instead, nutritional factors and difficulties with breastfeeding were more influential in participants’ decisions to exclusively breastfeed or not. Importantly, the policy change did provide nutritional and financial support to low-income mothers who had already decided to exclusively breastfeed.

KEYWORDS:

• Breastfeeding
• federal policy
• Indiana
• poverty
• WIC

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr. Virginia J. Vitzthum and Dr. Sarah D. Phillips for their guidance on this project, and Dr. Cecilia S. Obeng for sitting on my thesis committee. Thank you to Dr. Jonathan Thornburg for creating Table 1. A special thanks to Bloomington Area Birth Services (BABS) and the Crisis Pregnancy Center in Bloomington for allowing me to recruit participants through their organizations. The author would also like to thank the Indiana University Hutton Honors College for research funding.

Notes

1. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.