You have a few factors. Medicaid eligibility and more strongly location is a rough approximation for likelihood of complications or infant mortality.
I consulted for an opioid surveillance program several years ago at a large scale data analytics level.
It was very sobering - basically the scientists could score each pregnancy in the state on a scale of 0-100, where 0% was <5% probability of being born addicted and 100 was >95%.
Most addicted mothers got hooked on painkillers as a result of injury or sickness. The biggest factors were access to healthcare, access to transportation, and health insurance. “Bad” zip codes were like 10x more likely to have an opioid addiction and 25x more complications.
Being a new dad at the time, it really affected my view of politics in this space. I realized that as cynical as I am, it’s not enough.
800 meters from where I live a comfortable life kids are born into a statistically shorter, poorer life with more disease, more mental unhealth and fewer healthy years.
People there live, on average, 4.5 years shorter than people where I live with something like 10 fewer healthy years.
The statistics comparing people born here and there are pretty awful. Despite having the same hospital, infant mortality rate is something like 2x (although the statistical uncertainty is high).
How is this not a failure of society? In addition: I live in a country with pretty high social mobility, especially compared to the US...
I've seen it reported recently that both infant and maternal mortality has gone up in states that have outlawed abortion. Even if the doctor forecasts that the pregnancy will be a risk to the mother or infant, they don't want to be second-guessed after the fact and prosecuted for performing the abortion.
The variations don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason. Adjacent red and blue states do similarly (Idaho/Oregon, Minnesota/Iowa, Utah/Colorado). But North Dakota and South Dakota are quite different. Many states do worse (MD/VA) do worse than poorer ones (Oregon).
The article's item 3 would have to be backed up for me to take anything away from this. There have traditionally been very different methods for tracking this information, where countries drew lines, etc. When i did medical software (granted long ago) you could not compare data between the USA, France, or Japan in any useful way.
French doctors and the government have expressed concern over the rising mortality rate in recent years. Some worry that a contributing factor may be the relatively low rate of C-sections. Difficult labor is a major risk factor for neonatal death. It is also associated with intracranial hemorrhages at birth, which are common, but even more frequent and severe after complicated deliveries. These hemorrhages are often linked to wrongful diagnoses of shaken baby syndrome, which is commonly assumed whenever an infant presents with intracranial bleeding. France is likely among the countries with the highest rates of such misdiagnoses. Obvious to say the consequences for the child and their parents are severe.
Weird that some countries with high C-section rates are not particularly good in mortality (Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland), while the best countries by mortality has low C-section rates, Norway being the country with the lowest rate in the world.
Curiously, France has almost the exact same rate than Finland (200 per 1000 births), which tops the mortality list.
Meanwhile, in Finland, midwives here are worried abou the increase in C-sections in the last few years. It is most likely a cause of the decrease in funding towards healthcare, causing understaffed maternety wards and a push for c-sections on slow labor.
The opening graph is from the Office for National Statistics. The ONS is a UK govt department. So there is some UK data in the article but this is first-year mortality, not first month.
The author does say:
> The precise birth data needed to produce these comparable rates is not available for all countries, so only a selection of OECD countries is shown.
Perhaps this is the reason.
I do agree though, it's mighty strange to have not included an interpretation of you're going to mention them in the text. Perhaps they were excluded after the text was written?
Isn't the more appropriate question is where in the world are babies AND mothers at the lowest risks during all 9 months of gestation and then childbirth?
It's certainly another question, but the question of appropriateness seems to depend on context. I don't see what would make either more appropriate than the other in terms of "things a data analysis website might assess"?
It would be interesting to see infant mortality rate as a function of GDP per capita -- that would tell you which countries make best use of their wealth to ensure the health of their citizens' children.
(It's not hard to guess which country would come out looking even worse than it already does in this table.)
Readit News
I consulted for an opioid surveillance program several years ago at a large scale data analytics level.
It was very sobering - basically the scientists could score each pregnancy in the state on a scale of 0-100, where 0% was <5% probability of being born addicted and 100 was >95%.
Most addicted mothers got hooked on painkillers as a result of injury or sickness. The biggest factors were access to healthcare, access to transportation, and health insurance. “Bad” zip codes were like 10x more likely to have an opioid addiction and 25x more complications.
Being a new dad at the time, it really affected my view of politics in this space. I realized that as cynical as I am, it’s not enough.
People there live, on average, 4.5 years shorter than people where I live with something like 10 fewer healthy years.
The statistics comparing people born here and there are pretty awful. Despite having the same hospital, infant mortality rate is something like 2x (although the statistical uncertainty is high).
How is this not a failure of society? In addition: I live in a country with pretty high social mobility, especially compared to the US...
I wonder how the consistent gestational period adjustments would affect the statistics for the various states.
Curiously, France has almost the exact same rate than Finland (200 per 1000 births), which tops the mortality list.
>A baby in the UK, France, or the US can be two to three times more likely to die than one in Japan or Finland
why do they reference the UK while none of the graphs feature the UK?
The opening graph is from the Office for National Statistics. The ONS is a UK govt department. So there is some UK data in the article but this is first-year mortality, not first month.
The author does say:
> The precise birth data needed to produce these comparable rates is not available for all countries, so only a selection of OECD countries is shown.
Perhaps this is the reason.
I do agree though, it's mighty strange to have not included an interpretation of you're going to mention them in the text. Perhaps they were excluded after the text was written?
Dead Comment
(It's not hard to guess which country would come out looking even worse than it already does in this table.)