Dr. Amy Tuteur (Open Salon) finds fault in her blog with the CDC report on Infant Mortality.
She makes the highly unscientific and demeaning claim that “The authors (of the CDC report), however, seem more interested in jeering the US for its supposedly low standing in international comparisons than they seem in actually getting to the source of the problem.”
She makes this assertion because she finds that the CDC authors have failed to take "race" into account. She states correctly that "African-American" women deliver pre-term babies at a higher rate than "white" American women. She goes on to say “Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the USSweden is because in contrast with the USA with the highest percentage of women of African descent of any first world country. Sweden, of course, has virtually none.” has a higher infant mortality rate than
I invite her to visit the Red Cross Meeting Center in Linköping, Sweden where volunteers like me (born in the USA) work with women of African descent who have given birth in Sweden. These women of African descent were themselves born in Somalia (the dominant group), Ethiopia, Eretria and many other African countries. One of them has to date given birth to 12 children, some of whom I know very well. I do not know if the Swedish maternal care system is allowed to record the “race” of pregnant women, but I will find out.
Dr. Tuteur might better have first informed herself about the Swedish maternal care system where 99 percent of all pregnant women enter the maternal health care system early in pregnancy. She might also give us, her readers, her estimates of the relative importance of the genome of the women of African descent, the life history of these same women, and the fact that not all these women get first-class medical care from early in their pregnancy to the time of delivery.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
Facts be damned, bees must be poked...... (And the bees pay her bills via her website.)
Gotta love the cojones on her.......
Hope to write at my main blog that nobody reads
www.only-neverinsweden.blogspot.com
Larry
"The reason the U.S. Af-Am birth-mortality rate pulls down the average has, I daresay, more to do with American society than African genomes..."
Indeed, that's what most of the literature that I've read assumes. Labelling it as "race" obscures the fact that it's a combination of income (and access to nutrition, time off and everything else that income can buy), position in the societal hierarcy (linked to but not entirely dependent on income) and access to health services (in the U.S., strongly linked to income, but not necessarily the case in other countries, as Larry points out).
Labelling this mix of causal influences as being "race" is just fooling yourself.
I said much what Larry said (but perhaps more obliquely) in an as-yet-unaddressed comment on Amy's article...would be interested to see what reaction it gets.