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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.

Here is a possibility: "Induced abortion by vacuum aspiration is associated with an increased risk of first-trimester miscarriage in the subsequent pregnancy.". Furthermore, "women with previous history of two or three induced abortions were at risk of preterm birth, very preterm birth and low birth weight babies in the subsequent pregnancies. The risk of caesarean was found to be increased in women with previous two or three spontaneous abortions exposing the women to the morbidity associated with the C-section."

African American women are more likely to have multiple abortions.

If both these are true, I don't know what else we'd expect. It also might explain why richer African American women have worse outcomes - do wealthier African Americans have more abortions than poorer African American women?