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womensenews.org

National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign

Also: Babies Were Born to Be Breastfed · NBAC

“Babies were born to be breastfed”

HHS Office on Women's Health campaign with Ad Council PSAs, June 2004 to April 2006, promoting six months of exclusive breastfeeding. TV spots showed pregnant women logrolling and riding a mechanical bull ('You'd never take risks before your baby is born. Why start after?').

Years
2004–2006
Country
United States
Topic
BreastfeedingMaternal healthNutrition
Asks people to
Start
Strategy
Fear appealHumorMetaphor
Channel
OutdoorPrintRadioTV
Audience
ParentsYoung adults
First-time mothers, especially women 18-34 less likely to breastfeed.

Evidence

Self-reportedUnknown

Ad Council tracking: share of women saying breastfeeding is the best way to feed a baby rose from 51% before to about 68% after the campaign (small samples, e.g. 70 women 18-34 pre-launch). Critics (Wolf 2007) argued the risk-based fear framing overstated the evidence. UCS reported that infant-formula industry lobbying led HHS to soften the messages.

Sponsor (who paid)

  • Ad Council Ad Council (pro bono), campaign producer
  • U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women's Health Federal government, partner/sponsor

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Executions (individual ads)

  • Mechanical bull / logrolling risk PSAs 2004 · tv

Sources

  1. Wolf JB. Is breast really best? Risk and total motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign. J Health Polit Policy Law 2007;32(4):595-636 reference · 2007 · DOI 10.1215/03616878-2007-018 · PMID 17639013
  2. Political Pressure Sidelined HHS Efforts to Increase US Breastfeeding Rates (Union of Concerned Scientists) reference
  3. Controversial breast-feeding ads getting results (MDedge) news
  4. APHA 2007 abstract on the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign reference · 2007
  5. Teeth cut from breastfeeding campaign (Women's eNews) news · 2003
  6. Merewood A, Heinig J. Efforts to promote breastfeeding in the United States: development of a national breastfeeding awareness campaign. J Hum Lact 2004 history · 2004 · DOI 10.1177/0890334404264432 · PMID 15117511

Research notes

Volunteer creative agency not found; credits omitted (some recall McKinney & Silver, unverified). Breastfeeding is not a taxonomy topic; tagged maternal-health and nutrition. Possible PubMed/APHA evaluations of breastfeeding rates during NBAC should be checked. Links (#82) checked 2026-10-23: Ad Council pages from the Wayback Machine (adcouncil.org's old campaign pages), the Our History timeline or its case studies; dead campaign sites point to a Wayback copy from the campaign years.

Record cases/national-breastfeeding-awareness-campaign.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign