A Modern Mystery

A Modern Mystery:

African Americans Experience the Highest Infant Mortality Rates in the Modern World

A newborn’s survival and long-term health can be influenced by numerous aspects. The mother’s age is certainly a factor, as well as her fitness and her standard of living during her pregnancy.

Two of the most important factors of a young infant’s health and development are birth weight and gestational age at the time of birth. Infants that are born at or before 37 weeks, or under twenty-five hundred grams or five pounds eight ounces are at a greater risk of medical problems, disabilities, or death before they reach the age of one year.

Black women are three times more likely than white women to die during pregnancy, and twice as many black babies as white babies die in infancy

Compared with women from other ethnic groups such as Hawaiian, Native American Indian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese and even non-Hispanic Whites, black mothers have the highest percentage of low birth weight, and pre-term births. In 2000, more than one in ten black infants was born too small, and nearly one in five is born before the ideal time of birth. This disparity has been the case for quite some time now.

Although African American women have been dubbed as being very fertile, they’ve had considerably poorer birth outcomes than other ethnic group mothers, including low birth weight babies , very low birth weight babies (at or less than three pounds five ounces), and infant death.

In recent years there was an attempt to explain this as to the economic status, age at pregnancy, and other social effects such as housing, and employment, of black mothers.

But according to Professors of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA, researchers have found that even when they control for these varied factors ninety-percent of the differences in birth weight between black and white mothers still remains unaccounted for. Many studies have looked at...