On Infant Mortality

Infant Mortality statistics. Sounds boring. Something economists or public health specialists would work on during a weekday. I have never heard someone say the words in a conversation. Words like Infant Mortality, Mean Global Temperature, Life Expectancy and Gross Domestic Product would cause discomfort in conversation and would amount to something of a party foul among polite company. Use of these terms would seem pretentious in a social situation.

Infant Mortality. Infant. Baby. Mortality. Death. Infant Mortality is the rate at which babies die relative to babies that are born. Infant Mortality statistics are collected in almost every country in the world. The statistics tell a story about the places where they collected. The statistics bear sterile witness to a brutal phenomenon. Infant Mortality is the scourge of motherhood. It is every parents worst fear. It leaves whole families with broken hearts. It is the inversion of hope. Far from sterile, far from boring, Infant Mortality is unbearable and tragic. My own life was touched by infant mortality. My paternal grandmother died, along with her baby, in childbirth, when my father was three years old. The baby died three days later. The pain to my, then three year old, father must have been awful. The loss to my paternal grandfather would never be filled. Infant Mortality casts a long shadow over those who are still living and those yet to be born. I spent the last few weeks collecting and studying infant mortality statistics from the World Bank based on Estimates developed by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UNICEF, WHO, World Bank, UN DESA Population Division). The Infant mortality rate is the number of infants dying before reaching one year of age, per 1,000 live births in a given year. (http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators). The time range of the data was from 1994 to 2016. I collected data for every country in the world. For this study I also compared Life Expectancy (World Bank - Life expectancy at birth indicates the number of years a newborn infant would live if prevailing patterns of mortality at the time of its birth were to stay the same throughout its life.), Mobile cellular telephone subscriptions (World Bank - Number per 100 People, subscriptions to a public mobile telephone service using cellular technology, which provide access to the public switched telephone network. Post-paid and prepaid subscriptions are included) and Adolescent fertility rate (World Bank- the number of births per 1,000 women ages 15-19).

The data yielded some interesting insights about how infant mortality rates differ over time and between countries. The data supported conventional wisdom: Rich countries have lower infant mortality rates. European rates are lower than African rates. Cuba, Canada and the United States all have similiar rates ranging from 4.2 in Cuba to 5.7 in the United States. My goal in this research was not to summarize the available data. My interest is in the broad trends, the outliers and the other factors.

Since this article is already likely taxing your patience I will leave you, for now, with a simple insight. The world as a whole is getting better in terms of infant mortality. Very few countries have failed to improve Infant Mortality. Orange labeled countries made large improvements. Yellow countries failed to improve or got worse. The trend is clear. Infant Mortality rate falls by half or more in almost all countries. No countries exceed 100 deaths per 1000 births. Far fewer exceed 50 deaths per 1000 births. Things are getting better.