A project where mothers breastfeed early and hold their babies skin to skin aims to reduce neonatal deaths
When Sushma Sahu gave birth to her first son six years ago in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, her mother-in-law asked the local Hindu priest to recommend an auspicious time to start breastfeeding the baby. The priest set a time on the infant’s third day of life. In the meantime, the newborn would be fed with honey and water then cow’s milk. “My first time, I didn’t know anything,” says Sahu. “I trusted my mother-in-law and whatever she was saying.”
But three years later when Sahu gave birth to her second child, a daughter, the nurse in the primary health care centre told her to start breastfeeding immediately, as recommended by the World Health Organisation to ensure newborns get their mother’s first milk (known as colostrum). Colostrum is rich in protective antibodies, vitamin A and proteins, and is only produced in the first few days after childbirth. Sahu did as the nurse suggested. “I also felt like breastfeeding, so when the nurse told me, I didn’t really wait for anybody,” she says.
Now Sahu is one of a small group of Indian mothers who are trying to persuade others to breastfeed their newborns straight after birth and to provide skin-to-skin contact to help keep them warm. The women are part of a year-old experiment aimed at reducing Uttar Pradesh’s persistently high rates of infant mortality.
The project, led by the Community Empowerment Lab, a research organisation, has involved mothers like Sahu being trained as “life coaches” and then paid to advise women during their pregnancies and in the first month after their babies are born. The aim is to entice women to change their pre- and post-partum practices — including adopting early breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact, which together are known as “kangaroo mother care” — and measurably cut newborn deaths.
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