Breast-feeding and family planning: a review of the relationships between breast-feeding and family planning

Abstract

A number of interrelated factors must be considered when breast-feeding is introduced as a concern for family planning programs: the number of pregnancies and births experienced, age at each pregnancy and birth, duration of the intervals between conceptions, lactation including duration and type, health and nutritional services available to meet the demands of pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care. The dietary intake of the mother and her health and disease status have an effect on the duration of breast-feeding, and lactation has an effect on her ovulation and birth spacing. Those at particularly high risk include adolescent girls, older grand-multipara women, and families living in poverty. A historical relationship between the reduction in infant and childhood mortality and the falling off of births can be documented. The straightforward benefits on nutritional status of breast-fed infants, in conjunction with the antibody protection afforded by breast milk, served to reduce infant mortality and indirectly served to reduce birth rates. In addition, the prolongation of postpartum anovulatory cycles in breast-feeding women, coupled with sexual mores that postpone sexual relations while a woman is breast-feeding in certain groups, will serve to prolong the interbirth intervals. Populations where breast-feeding is customary have been shown to have fewer births than populations where the women do not breast-fed and where infants are artificially fed.