This is what makes me tear up and scream at the monitor all at once: Many of us have iPods, strollers that cost more than our first car, food that spoils before we ever eat it and peds appointments always just around the corner. And yet, right in our own backyard, the infant mortality rate is climbing. Babies born, mostly to impoverished women of color in the South, are dying in alarming numbers of causes that should be simple to treat.

Many of these families experience a perfect storm of low birth weight, inadequate prenatal treatment, lack of information about basic baby care.   As a result, 11.4 deaths per thousand infants born occurs in Mississippi alone.  The U.S. average is 5.4.  In this and neighboring states, mother-care is deeply embedded in this crisis, with many women who smoke, have hypertension, are diabetic or are obese having children early and without adequate support or information.

There have been hopeful and steep declines in infant mortality rates in areas where privately-funded organizations send local women door-to-door to counsel pregnant women and post-natal mothers. It is clear that racism, poverty, insurance bullshit and limited (if any) access to medical treatment is working against effective interventions.

[photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times]