Infant mortality causes and solutions, along with nutrition before conception needs to be taught in middle school.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1448444

Here is the link. Bottom line, midwifery care reduced maternal mortality as much as aspectic technique did. This is a stunning fact. Knowledge of normal birth is essential to good outcomes.

Am J Public Health. 2004 August; 94(8): 1312–1320. PMCID: PMC1448444

Copyright © American Journal of Public Health 2004

The Decline in Maternal Mortality in Sweden
The Role of Community Midwifery

Ulf Högberg, MD, PhD

The author is with Obstetrics & Gynecology, Department of Clinical Science, and Epidemiology, Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, University of Umeå, Umeå, Sweden.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Ulf Högberg, MD, PhD, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Department of Clinical Science, University of Umeå, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden (e-mail: ulf.hogberg@obgyn.umu.se).
Accepted October 22, 2003.

Also, I would like data for maternal deaths of mothers giving birth in hospitals in the United States compared to the world when the mothers were given drugs.

Thank you so much for any information you can give me.

Kathryn Mora
Waltham, Massachusetts

Basic trends such as encouragement of breastfeeding and other proper infant nutrition practices, which are promoted both in third world countries (both culturally and via international health organisations) and among the upper-middle class in developed countries, are yet to penetrate the economically depressed segments of US society.

If simple measures such as breastfeeding were pushed the way abortion is in this country, poor/uneducated women would know how to give their babies the best chance of survival when they do have them rather than just where to go when they don’t want to have them!

Unfortunately in this case the excuse given has some limited merit, and therefore I expect that the “statistical illusion” meme will not be defeated simply by painstakingly explaining why it is not true like this post does.
Reality is simply much too complex for typical political discourse in this case, namely:

1. Some countries do have lower infant mortality rates but use different registering practices than USA.
2. Some countries do not use diffenrent registering practices but still have vastly lower infant mortality rates than US.

Frankly, you can explain that slowly and repeatedly for “USA has the best healthcare in the world”-folk like those on QuandO blog, and it will not make an ounce of difference.

Most likely there is a short pause when they wonder what the hell you are talking about, and pretty soon somebody will helpfully point out:
“Dude, have you heard that those other countries have different registering practices for infant mortality”

Case in point, this discussion.

Policy: Access to healthcare is a privilege, not a right.
Result: High infant mortality.

How is this result not completely logical and expected?

There are big, basically tax-funded efforts in other industrial countries to reduce infant mortality, and as a result for example pregnancies are much more closely monitored by professionals.

Nobody is claiming that every American woman has the same kind access to healthcare even during pregnancy, yet somehow the suggestion that this obvious difference might lead to different outcomes is ridiculously controversial.

The key methodological difference with foreign countries is how they register very low birthweight babies (weight at delivery of less than 1,500 grams per 100 live births), not stillborns. VLBW babies have high mortality rates and often die shortly after being born. In Cuba and many European countries births of less than 1000 grams are not counted toward mortality statistics, nor are the equivalent medical interventions as in the US attempted to save VLBW babies.

For more:

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/24/3/583

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/infantmort/infantmort.htm

The U.S. system does guarantees everyone who walks into a hospital door a very expensive hospital delivery, while denying pregnant women inexpensive routine prenatal care that can prevent stillbirths and infant mortality (most of which has its roots in pregnancy itself) like prenatal vitamins and ultrasounds to identify high risk pregnancies as early as possible. This simply doesn’t make economic sense.

Indeed, if we had guaranteed pregnancy care, as most of the rest of the world does, many poor women who now turn to emergency rooms to deliver babies in low risk pregnancies, might instead prefer assistance from midwives who would transfer laboring women to hospitals only when actually necessary, at a much lower cost. This cost savings alone would more than pay for universal prenatal care. Likewise, scheduling C sections in advance in high risk cases screened in prenatal care before they got out of hand, would save many lives of mothers and infants alike, as well as immense cost, currently spent handling high risk births in emergency rooms.

Reducing infant mortality isn’t rocket science. Cuba manages to do it. The U.S. ought to be able to manage it.

“And boom goes the logic”

Blacks have a genetically higher infant mortality rate, don’t gimmie any crap about racism is a curse on the womb when pregnant whites are forcedfed government degeneracy, government bullshit, and we have a grim outlook where our lives will be spent for wars for Israel, I ain’t having any of it! (Bush, is not one of us, he’s not one of us! how many times do I have to say it, He is an honorary jew and works for international judeocorporate interests only, watch “loose change”)

Countries like Norway and Canada are not full of blacks or white-liberal fans of black-sports and minstreltainment.

Blacks – in fact anyone with dark skin – is at much higher risk of vitamin D deficiency, particularly in northern climates where there is less sunlight. (Dark skin is designed to keep the sunlight from penetrating into the deep layers, making it useful in sunny climates where it prevents skin damage but a liability in unsunny climes where it prevents the sun from converting chemicals under the skin into vitamin D). Although associatedby most people with bone formation and calcium metabolism, it may also play arole in immune function and lack of vitamin D may be a factor in asthma. I remember reading about a study that said that a large number of black women were vitamin D deficient. (I believe that blacks are more likely to be lactose intolerant than whites, so it is also likely that not as many black people drink vitamin D fortified milk).

Perhaps part of what is needed is a campaign to get people, particularly dark-skinned people, to eat more vitamin D, either through supplementing more things or through education, or through distributing vitamin D pills.

It depends. If she’s poor enough to be on Medicaid, she doesn’t pay anything. There are probably some people who birth at home to avoid the stigma of Medicaid, but I doubt it’s very many.

If you’re too rich for Medicaid but too poor to pay cash, you can show up at an emergency room and they’ll take care of you. (They have to.) They’ll bill you but not expect to be paid; so you have a hit to your credit rating but not your wallet.

The cash price for an ordinary delivery and short hospital stay is around $10,000. (Guess who’s paying for the ER delivery.)

The number of people whose religious convictions forbid them from having medical assistance for a delivery is very small.

I would also like to know if the fact that Americans are very religious and if some sects/religions refuse proper access to mothers to health care and modern medecine.

Anyone know?

My first question is, how does this critique account for the enormous racial gap in infant mortality within the USA? (It seems unlikely that in the US, doctors try harder to save babies of color while categorizing similar white babies as stillborn.)

I suspect it is due to socioeconomic factors: POC generally can not afford as good health care (general and prenatal) and may have unhealthier eating habits due to being poor (not getting all the nutrients etc.) Also, decidedly unhealthy behaviours such as drug use tend to be more common with certain ethnicities.

To prove that this is not just a rote dismissal based on generalization, I point that among the group Hispanics, Cubans (correct me if I’m wrong) who tend to be richer the infant mortality is very slightlyless than with whites, and significantly less than with Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics.

Ditto for similar socioeconomic analysis for Asian subgroups.

The US’s terrible track record, compared to other wealthy countries, is not an “alleged problem”; it is an atrocity, and one that shouldn’t be swept under the rug rather than addressed.

I agree, FWIW.