Infant Mortility and Poor Women

Yesterday my daughter who is eight months pregnant received a visit from the Healthy Start Project. It’s a federal program designed to cut the Infant Mortality rate among poor and African American women. The Program educates poor women about how to keep their babies from being low birth weight and keep them alive for the first year. Twenty-six years ago my daughter was enrolled in this program as a research subject for the Project. It was called the same thing.


I got to thinking about Infant Mortality and Poverty since impoverished women seem to have a problem with low birth rates and infant mortality. Not one article written by doctors could explain to me why. They could only guess. The truth is Poor women do NOT trust people who do research or even middle-class people. We are not going to just open up to people who want to study us. I wonder how middle-class people would feel if we researched them and treated them like we were monkeys in a cage.




How do we know that poor women lose more babies than rich women? As for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), we know the rules. Most of us Grandmothers remember putting our kids to bed on their bellies, but in 1995, when my youngest daughter was born, we were taught to put babies on their backs. We did it, because just like mothers all over the world, we feared SIDS.

It remains that way. I never advised my daughters to put my grandchildren on their backs because I wanted them to survive.


I am weary of researchers linking everything to poverty. Lots of things cannot be blamed on poverty alone. I am also leery of African-American women being lumped together. If you are lumping women together by race and not dividing them up by income level, how can you be sure they are all impoverished? The  majority of African American women are NOT impoverished and I doubt that the researchers know how many poor white women they interviewed if they weren't classified by white.


  The same with Latinos every Latino is not poor. The only factor that poor people have in common that may be different is stress, but mostly we are stressed because we have no money or because of the violence in our communities. However, middle-class people still seemed more stressed because a lot of them are stuck in jobs that they hate