Breastfeeding patterns in Puerto Rico

In the 1950s, Puerto Rico began an active industrialization program. We used data from the 1982 Puerto Rico Fertility and Family Planning Assessment to describe the trend in the incidence of breastfeeding in Puerto Rico over time and to ascertain some of its determinants. From 1946 through 1982, 5,884 infants were born among this statistically representative sample of reproductive-aged women. The proportion of infants who had ever been breastfed was 59 percent for births before 1960 (mean duration = 7.8 months), dropped to 25 percent for infants born from 1970 to 1974 (mean duration = 4.9), and rose to 38 percent for births delivered from 1980 to 1982 (mean duration = 3.4). Prior breastfeeding experience was an important determinant of breastfeeding a newborn. Infants of mothers who had breastfed a previous baby were 7.3 times more likely to be breastfed (95% confidence interval = 6.6, 8.0) compared with infants of mothers who had not previously breastfed. The 38 percent of infants who were breastfed in Puerto Rico in the early 1980s is below the 74 percent to 97 percent reported in Latin America and below the 54 percent reported in the United States for the same period. This study provides baseline data for any future intervention strategies.