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Interventions and policy approaches to promote equity in breastfeeding

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Call for papers for a special collection in International Journal for Equity in Health

Edited by Rafael Perez-Escamilla and Mireya Vilar-Compte

Providing accessible, high-quality and equitable support for all women who want to breastfeed is a sound social investment. Fair access to programs, policies and infrastructure that promotes, protects and support breastfeeding should be seen as a social justice issue. Hence any social, economic, legal, political or biomedical factor preventing women to implement their right to breastfed should be framed as a health inequity and a social injustice.

There is extensive knowledge on key obstacles preventing breastfeeding, there is also literature suggesting that such obstacles are more salient for women depending on their income level, social position, ethnicity, country of origin, sexual identity, and age, amongst others. Given this knowledge, the aim of this special collection is to bring together research addressing the design, implementation and evaluation of programs and interventions targeted at reducing breastfeeding inequities.

We will consider papers analyzing these issues from different disciplinary lenses (i.e. public health, nutrition, anthropology, economics, social sciences and public policy) and methodological approaches – including any new qualitative or quantitative research or systematic review on the topic. Prior to submission, please send your abstract to info@biomedcentral.com typing Equity in Breastfeeding IJEH in the subject box, so we can inform you whether your paper fits scope of the article collection. The deadline for abstract submission is June 30th, 2020. 

If your abstract is a good fit for this collection, we will contact you by July 30th 2020 to invite you to submit a full manuscript. The deadline for submission of full manuscripts is October 15th 2020. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. If your abstract does not result in an invitation for submission of a manuscript to the collection, you can still submit the manuscript to this or any other journal of your choice.

Invited manuscripts will undergo the journal’s normal peer review process and be subject to an article-processing charge. For this collection, the Guest Editors will be able to assist with the waiver fee for one exceptional manuscript. Manuscripts should be formatted according to our submission guidelines and submitted via the online submission system. In the submission system please make sure that the correct collection title is chosen at the 'Additional Information' step. Please also indicate clearly in the covering letter that the manuscript is to be considered for this collection.

  1. Maternity leave policies are designed to protect gender equality and the health of mothers in the workforce and their children. However, maternity leave schemes are often linked to jobs in the formal sector ec...

    Authors: Grace Carroll, Mireya Vilar-Compte, Graciela Teruel, Meztli Moncada, David Aban-Tamayo, Heitor Werneck, Ricardo Montes de Moraes and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2022 21:20
  2. Because breastfeeding offers short- and long- term health benefits to mothers and children, breastfeeding promotion and support is a public health priority. Evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not likely to be t...

    Authors: M. Vilar-Compte, P. Gaitán-Rossi, E. C. Rhodes, V. Cruz-Villalba and R. Pérez-Escamilla
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:260
  3. Breastfeeding rates in Mexico are far from World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations with 28.8% of Exclusive Breastfeeding (EBF) under 6 months of age, according to the 2018 National Health and Nutrition...

    Authors: Diana Bueno-Gutiérrez, Edgar Uriel Romero Castillo and Angélica Emili Hernández Mondragón
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:173
  4. Socioeconomic inequalities could mitigate the impact of social and behavior change (SBC) interventions aimed at improving positive ideation towards the practice of exclusive breastfeeding. This study explores ...

    Authors: Dele Abegunde, Paul Hutchinson, Udochisom Anaba, Foyeke Oyedokun-Adebagbo, Emily White Johansson, Bamikale Feyisetan and Emma Mtiro
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:172
  5. Women are representing an increasing share of the labor force, thus, raising the need to accommodate breastfeeding working mothers at the workplace. While there is an emerging body of evidence supporting the p...

    Authors: Kathrin Litwan, Victoria Tran, Kate Nyhan and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:148
  6. In the United States, Black and Hispanic mothers have lower breastfeeding rates compared with White mothers. To address breastfeeding inequities, the Breastfeeding Heritage and Pride program (BHP) provides bre...

    Authors: Elizabeth C Rhodes, Grace Damio, Helen Wilde LaPlant, Walter Trymbulak, Carrianne Crummett, Rebecca Surprenant and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:128
  7. Poor access to healthcare facilities and consequently nutrition counseling services hinders the uptake of recommended infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices. To address these barriers and improve IYCF...

    Authors: Tuan T. Nguyen, Nemat Hajeebhoy, Jia Li, Chung T. Do, Roger Mathisen and Edward A. Frongillo
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:121
  8. Suboptimal breastfeeding rates in South Africa have been attributed to the relatively easy access that women and families have had to infant formula, in part as a result of programs to prevent maternal-to-chil...

    Authors: Debbie Vitalis, Mireya Vilar-Compte, Kate Nyhan and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:114
  9. Socio-economic inequities can strongly influence suboptimal infant feeding outcomes. Factors such as lack of knowledge about breastfeeding, low family income, low educational attainment, social and economic st...

    Authors: Wen Shu, Menglong Li, Nubiya Amaerjiang, Xin Fan, Shunna Lin, Sofia Segura-Pérez, Rafael Pérez-Escamilla and Yifei Hu
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:111
  10. Breastfeeding can be affected by maternal employment. This is important considering that in 2019, 47.1% of women globally participated in the labor force. The aim of this study was to review workplace interven...

    Authors: Mireya Vilar-Compte, Sonia Hernández-Cordero, Mónica Ancira-Moreno, Soraya Burrola-Méndez, Isabel Ferre-Eguiluz, Isabel Omaña and Cecilia Pérez Navarro
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:110
  11. Providing an enabling environment for breastfeeding is hampered by the inequitable implementation of paid maternity leave, primarily due to perceived or actual financial costs. To estimate the real cost of pai...

    Authors: Adiatma Y. M. Siregar, Pipit Pitriyan, Donny Hardiawan, Paul Zambrano and Roger Mathisen
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:95
  12. The United Kingdom has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in Europe, with the initiation and continuation of breastfeeding shown to be closely related to the mothers’ age, ethnicity and social class. Whilst...

    Authors: Erica Jane Cook, Faye Powell, Nasreen Ali, Catrin Penn-Jones, Bertha Ochieng and Gurch Randhawa
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:92
  13. There are inequalities in breastfeeding initiation and continuation rates, whereby socio-economically disadvantaged mothers are least likely to breastfeed. Breastfeeding peer support (BPS) interventions are re...

    Authors: Louise Hunt, Gill Thomson, Karen Whittaker and Fiona Dykes
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:83
  14. In the U.S., strong ethnic/racial, socioeconomic, demographic, and geographic breastfeeding (BF) inequities persist, and African American and Hispanic women are less likely to meet their breastfeeding goals co...

    Authors: Sofia Segura-Pérez, Amber Hromi-Fiedler, Misikir Adnew, Kate Nyhan and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:72
  15. In Canada, 91% of all mothers initiate breastfeeding, but 40–50% stop by 6 months and only 34% breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, with lower rates among socially and/or economically vulnerable women. The Can...

    Authors: Jane Francis, Alison Mildon, Stacia Stewart, Bronwyn Underhill, Samantha Ismail, Erica Di Ruggiero, Valerie Tarasuk, Daniel W. Sellen and Deborah L. O’Connor
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:71
  16. Breastfeeding has positive impacts on the health, environment, and economic wealth of families and countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) in 1991 a...

    Authors: Andini Pramono, Julie Smith, Jane Desborough and Siobhan Bourke
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:22
  17. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), low levels of formal maternal educational are positively associated with breastfeeding whereas the reverse is true among women with higher levels of formal educatio...

    Authors: Paulo A. R. Neves, Aluisio J. D. Barros, Giovanna Gatica-Domínguez, Juliana S. Vaz, Phillip Baker and Chessa K. Lutter
    Citation: International Journal for Equity in Health 2021 20:20