Father's Day: Babies Pay for Detroit’s 60-Year Slide With Mortality Above Mexico's

From Bloomberg.com:

Detroit's 60-year deterioration has taken a toll not just on business owners, investors and taxpayers.

It’s meant misery for its most vulnerable: children and the women who bear them.

While infant mortality fell for decades across the U.S., progress bypassed Detroit, which in 2012 saw a greater proportion of babies die before their first birthdays than any American city, a rate higher than in China, Mexico and Thailand.

Pregnancy-related deaths helped put Michigan’s maternal mortality rate in the bottom fifth among states.

One in three pregnancies in the city is terminated...

Detroit’s crisis is a foot on the neck of women and children.

Mothers’ obesity, diabetes, poverty-related stress and poor nutrition can harm infants even before they are born...

Health isn’t determined just by poverty, but by race, which plays a disproportionate role in Detroit. Blacks composed 84 percent of residents in 2010, according to the census.

Black babies in neighborhoods with the lowest poverty level are more likely to die than white infants in neighborhoods with the highest poverty, according to a state report last year.

In 2010, non-whites made up 21 percent of Michigan’s population but 43 percent of infant deaths...

Almost half of Detroit women who move forward with pregnancy don’t receive adequate prenatal care...

That can lead to premature birth, the leading cause of infant mortality, whose rate hit 15 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2012, state data show. That’s the highest of any U.S. city and more than double the national average.

It also compares unfavorably to Mexico’s 14 deaths per 1,000 live births, China’s 12 and Thailand’s 11, according to the World Bank...
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Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-11/babies-pay-for-detroit-s-fall-with-mortality-above-mexico.html