Infant Mortality Rate Rises in U.S. for First Time in More Than 40 Years [View All]

Some substantial but unknown percentage of Bush voters in 2004 voted for Bush primarily because of his strong “pro-life” stance. As one of my pro-life relatives said during one of our rare political discussions prior to the 2004 election, if Bush gets voted out of office, “a lot of babies will die”.

Given this state of affairs, one would think (or hope) that these people would be interested and concerned about the infant mortality rate in the U.S. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any recent information on this topic, as the latest statistics I could find were from almost three years ago - 2002. I understand that sometimes it takes a while to accumulate these statistics and put the reports together. Nevertheless, I worked as an epidemiologist in county and state health departments for 12 years, from 1982 to 1994, and I don’t remember anything as basic as national infant mortality statistics not being available for this long a period of time. Even Cuba, whose infant mortality rate is now lower than that of the U.S., recently reported 2004 statistics. If I was a “conspiracy theorist” or if I had severe doubts about the integrity of our current Presidential Administration I would suggest that it may have ordered our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cease any further release of this information after the bad news of 2002. But maybe I just didn’t do a good enough job of searching for this information.

Anyhow, as noted in this report by the American Public Health Association (APHA), the infant mortality rate in the United States increased from 2001 to 2002 by 3%, from 6.8 deaths per thousand infants to 7.0 deaths per thousand infants. That rate, though higher than in almost every other industrialized country in the world today, decreased by a great amount during the 20th century (it was about three times higher as recently as 1970 than it was at the start of the 21st century), and 2002 saw the first significant increase in infant mortality in this country since 1958.

Infant mortality rate has long been considered one of the best indicators of the health status of a community or country. According to Georges Benjamin, executive director of APHA, potential reasons for the surprising turnaround in infant mortality in this country include: “women receiving less prenatal care or losing their jobs, cuts to nutrition programs, and climbing poverty rates”.

Under such circumstances we must consider ourselves very fortunate to have such a “pro-life” President – otherwise we might now be seeing even greater increases in infant mortality rate.