Purpose: To determine whether participants in the Baby Talk prenatal education program were more likely to initiate breastfeeding than nonparticipants.
Design: 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.
Setting: Urban Midwest county.
Sample: 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).
Intervention: A 12-hour prenatal education curriculum with 2.5 hours of breastfeeding content.
Measures: The primary outcome was breastfeeding at hospital discharge as reported in vital statistics.
Analysis: Likelihood-ratio χ2 and Fisher exact test were used to test the significant association between categorical variables.
Results: 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).
Conclusions: 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.
Keywords: breastfeeding; health communications; health disparities; patient education.