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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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NYT implies racism is responsible for Black babies dying in childbirth (contrary to the very evidence they present)

https://archive.is/LuD27

Years back there was a popular news item that black babies were more likely to die in delivery than white babies. Intelligent minds disagreed on the cause, and the NYT blamed racism. There was a good discussion in it on the_motte. Newly published research now shows that the wealthiest black women also have high infant mortality rates, which does not trend down as income trends up as it does for whites. More strikingly, and not mentioned in the article but obvious in the graph, the poorest Hispanics have 25% less than the infant mortality of whites, and the poorest Asians have 50% the infant mortality of whites. (Theirs, too, trends down by income).

That’s an extraordinary piece of information: our poorest immigrant populations have wildly low infant mortality rates. Rationally, we should conclude that multigenerational Americans are struggling hard, both white and black. That should be the focus of the article. It’s not. But my takeaway is that the immigrant populations are healthier or (in the case of Hispanics) having younger babies. The idea that racist hospital workers or general ambient racism is selectively allowing black people to die and immigrant babies to thrive is obviously ridiculous when there is no accompanied evidence. Any hypothetical racist structure would harm the recent Chinese and Honduran as much as the African American except for most picky of racists.

There are two possible reasons for the plight of black mothers. The first is that their behaviors are bad. There is some evidence that black behaviors are worse on average, in particular that even the wealthiest black families have higher crime and obesity rates than expected. But it may also be that intelligent black women are being swooped up by corporations at a higher rate, and if they are marrying black men (or becoming single mothers) then they may be the breadwinner of the family. The added stress of being a working mother may lead to the increased infant mortality rate which is not found among white mothers.

A good question is why in Britain women of African descent have much higher maternal mortality rates despite having income levels that are basically at parity with White British women while Pakistani & Bangladeshi women who are much poorer have similar levels of maternal mortality compared to White British women.

Don't people with higher levels of sub-saharan African ancestry have shorter pregnancies on average than individuals with lower levels? Could this not be the main explanation? AFAIK pre-term births are quite strongly correlated with infant mortality.

Edit: Just from the abstract, Blacks have shorter pregnancies and a higher rate of pre-term births.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2292982/

But weirdly have lower pre-term mortality? The paper specifically states that black infant mortality surpasses whites only after 37 weeks of gestation. Weird.

Yeah, that part seems weird and I’m wondering if there’s some funky statistics going on.

Seems to me the most likely answer is that the ideal term for blacks is shorter than that for whites. I think that's what that paper is getting at, too.