New York City Has Healthier Babies, Because They Want Them
In 2009, according to the numbers just released by the City at the end of 2010, New York City had 126,774 live births! And 90,000 pregnancies—that were reported, at least!—ended in chosen termination. So of course the Archbishop is weeping and freaking out.
According to the Department of Health: "For women under the age of 25, more pregnancies end in induced termination than in a live birth or spontaneous termination."
Other fun facts: almost 15% of abortions in NYC were for married women. I don't know if that sounds low or high to me!
Anyway, nobody tell the Church, but this doesn't even taken into account the thousands upon thousands of morning-after pills dispensed in the City. (There's a reason it doesn't take them into account, by the way!) It also doesn't count the most likely hundreds of thousands of would-be pregnancies that last only a few minutes or hours, that are then ended by God, due to his mysterious ways and designs—would-be pregnancies that no one ever knows about, and boy howdy, don't you just think that if the Catholics ever stopped to think about this, they'd never get anything done ever again and wouldn't have any time to object to art shows?
All this reproductive health and choice means—or, to be fair to our statistics-minded friends, is associated with, if not related to!—that Manhattan has one of the best infant health rates in the country.
In case you are preparing to be an infant yourself, rest easy. You're doing pretty great (especially if you're a white infant), what with the infant mortality rate in NYC now being just 5.3 per 1000 births. (One hundred years ago, it was about 120 per 1000 births in New York City.)
In the U.S. overall, the rate is now about 6.6 per 1000. But if you live in Manhattan, it's just 4.1 per 1000 births.
In other news, only 389 people died from firearms in 2009. And only 57 of them were 19 or younger!
In slightly less good news: are you black in New York City and 35 and a half years old? Congratulations! You're at the exact statistical midpoint of your life.
In another life, Choire would have made THE BEST stats professor.
AND there goes Ross Douthat's head. Boom.
That NYC's population has access to an astounding 8 level-4 NICUs probably doesn't hurt.
I aspire to be an OT-IX NICU.
We're also surrounded by garbage and elitism, both of which boost the immune system.
I wonder if anyone did further work on the Freakonomics theory that crime rates began to decrease 10 years ago because poor people started to have access to legal abortion 20 years prior.
I didn't know Boehner was archbishop!
The Archbishop was weeping because he TOTALLY wanted to babysit all 90,0000 of those kids. Now what's he going to do with his time?
Yes, but the US as a whole has ridiculously high infant mortality rates given our supposed development level. We're on par with Croatia and Belarus, for a point of reference.*
CIA Factbook has the US listed as 46th out of the 224 countries and country-like places** they've got information on, which will be a useful tidbit to bring up when you're debating your Republican relatives about whether the US has the best healthcare in the world or not.
*Nothing against Croatia and Belarus, obviously.
**They've got separate stats for overseas territories and similarly not-quite autonomous places, which is why there are 224 entries rather than just the 200ish countries.
This comparison gets thrown around all the time (cough*ricky lake*cough)but shouldn't be. As any US OB surgeon will point out is that the US has a lower gestational cutoff for counting infant death which inflates our rate.
You can talk to all the OB surgeons you want, but the CDC says "it appears unlikely that differences in reporting are the primary explanation for the United States’ relatively low international ranking." They instead attribute the high infant mortality rate primarily to the disproportionately large number of premature births, which is not a positive indicator of maternal health or overall health, either.
(That's all from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm#summary if anyone's interested)
"unlikely" "primary" That means "yes this difference in reporting accounts for some of the difference in ranking but we are guessing it isn't most significant reason…" And when you run the 46th number you;re including a lot more than Europe with far different reporting requirements. As that same CDC report you cited notes, the US rank compared to EU countries when controlling for reporting requirement differences is, while still poor, within a point or so of a bunch of other countries. The real outliers being Sweden/Norway/Finland, something that certainly has something to with more widely available socialized healthcare.
I'm not even arguing it's the ONLY reason, or even the primary one. But alot of data gets thrown around purely for the shock appeal and it does a disservice to the debate.
I can tell you a really genuine reason the US ranks so poor as well, but the last time I brought that up here things got… unpleasant. so….
BTW if you really want to get even more angry about another reason for the high US infant mortality rate here's a good place to start:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/29/11/2114.full
I can tell you a really genuine reason the US ranks so poor as well, but the last time I brought that up here things got… unpleasant. so….
Well played, sweetheart.