Infant and Maternal Mortality

"America’s maternal mortality rate is shocking: In 2023—the most recent year for which there’s reliable data—almost 19 in 100,000 women died in childbirth. (The equivalent figure in the UK was 12.67.) Among black women, the rate was 50 in 100,000. Every American should demand better care for mothers—and be grateful to Carmon for her reporting." (Iris Carmon, author of Unbearable.)  Kara Kennedy "Progressives Can't Bear Pregnancy" at The Free Press

Numbers like this circulate a lot. Aaron Sorkin* had one of his characters rant over a decade ago about everything the US did wrong, and nearly every number had the same explanation. The black numbers are much worse in many categories, and they are 11% of the overall population. If you apply that to the quote above, you will see that our mortality rate is not shocking - our black mortality rate is shocking. The rest of the country, including Hispanics and Asians, is about the same as the UK. This applies to education rankings, longevity, homicide, incarceration, and more. If you do the quick math in your head and multiply the black rate by whatever factor separates them and then apply it to the whole, the numbers match up moderately well. 

The followup questions are all variations of why. There is an automatic leaping to the conclusion that it must be about racism, or poverty, or lack of access, or medical professionals paying worse attention to black women.  Yet when you try to illustrate with real data what people are sure must be true it turns out to be hard to nail down. Because the mortality numbers vary somewhat by state, inequality is probably part of the answer.  That could be some of it.  But it is well less than half the explanation, because the numbers are the same for blacks in other countries.  For every country to be exactly as racist, or blacks there to be exactly as comparatively poor is less likely than the probability that something genetic is happening. Survival in Africa was different from survival in Pakistan was different from survival in London. That this entire evolutionary history vanishes in a couple of centuries is too much to ask. 

Other countries talk about racism, but we are one of the very few countries that actually are multi-racial.  I have long been irritated at Europeans sniffing at us when they are just short of a Viking invasion for whiteness overall. Plus, their record with Jews and Roma is still poor, and recent immigration is not going smoothly. The Anglo Canadians don't even get along with their French, who were also white Northern Europeans. Sorry, that was a tangent to an old soapbox of mine. 

None of the three links address full reasons for the maternal/infant mortality rates racial disparities, but they all bring out interesting possibilities. 

I think Cremieux's is the most interesting  and most thorough

Peter Frost  at Aporia has one about Mother-Fetus Mismatch that was surprising.

Plus some data from Europe. I am wondering if the UK definition of Asian is different from ours, or the countries that make it up have a different balance.

*When I went looking for the Aaron Sorkin tirade from over a decade ago that the US is not the greatest country in the world, citing the infant mortality statistics.  Graph Paper Diaries was the sixth search engine entry.