a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics found that infant mortality fell 3% between 2019 and 2021. However, the good news is tempered by wide racial and economic disparities and the U.S.’s poor international standing in infant and maternal health.
Black and Indigenous mothers are consistently more likely than white and Asian mothers to have children who die in their first year of life, a statistic that reflects disparities in maternal mortality.
“While a small decline is a wonderful trend in the right direction, for the amount of money we are putting in we should see significant improvements,” said Dr. Erika Werner, chief physician of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical. center in Massachusetts.
“We are one of the countries that spend the most on healthcare, and in particular we spend a lot on prenatal care and a lot of pediatric care. Yet, in terms of other developed countries, we still have one of the highest infant mortality rates.”
The new report includes data collected from birth and death certificates from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Child mortality is widely seen as an indicator of the health of countries.
The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths among babies under one year old who died per 1,000 live births. In the US, the infant mortality rate fell by 3% between 2019 and 2021, from 5.58 to 5.44.
That figure continues a trend found by other government researchers, such as a 2018 report in Jama Pediatrics which showed that all-cause mortality for infants and children decreased between 1999 and 2015.
Yet the health of American babies lags behind that of Canada and Britain. And the US has striking differences in race and class characteristics.
Black mothers are more than three times as likely as Asian and twice as likely as white mothers to have children who die within their first year of life. Similarly, women who have low incomes and qualify for government food and health care assistance are at greater risk of infant mortality.
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Werner called the factors behind such differences “multifactorial,” but added that researchers “know that (during) pregnancy and childbirth and the early postpartum period there are more barriers to entry (and) likely more stress due to structural racism in certain populations compared to other population groups”.
The new report also found that babies whose mothers smoked, received late or no prenatal care and were eligible for government health assistance were more likely to die. Worryingly, this was also noted in the new CDC report provisional data for 2022 showed an increase in infant mortality.