More than 80% of mothers in the United States started breastfeeding their infants at birth in 2013, 52% were breastfeeding at 6 months, and 30% were breastfeeding at 12 months, according to a breastfeeding report card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Overall, 29 states, including Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, have met the Healthy People 2020 objective of 81.9% of infants who have ever been breastfed. However, only 12 states met the breastfeeding goal of 60.6% of infants breastfeeding at 6 months of age.
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“High breastfeeding initiation rates show that most mothers in the U.S. want to breastfeed and are trying to do so,” according to the report. But the lower rates at 6 and 12 months “suggest that mothers, in part, may not be getting the support they need, such as from health care providers, family members, and employers.”
In the report, CDC officials call on states to use their breastfeeding statistics as a call to action for goals including monitoring breastfeeding progress, sharing success stories from effective hospital and community programs, building state profiles of community breastfeeding support, and identifying ways to increase breastfeeding rates through maternity care programs and peer and professional support networks.
The 2016 Breastfeeding Report Card included data from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The data were taken from the U.S. National Immunization Surveys from 2014 and 2015 and referred to infants born in 2013. “Since breastfeeding data are obtained by maternal recall when children are between 19 and 35 months of age, breastfeeding rates are analyzed by birth cohort rather than survey year,” the researchers noted.
Read the complete findings on the CDC website.