An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report.
American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.
Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.
The joke, of course, is that so many on the right piss and moan concerning abortion while our nation blithely permits the deaths really born children. We grieve over terminated pregnancies, but turn our eyes and silence our collective outrage when real children die due to inequities in the delivery of health care that are directly related to socio-economic inequality. Weeping over aborted fetuses (feti? I am never sure how to make a plural of a Latinate word in English) costs no one anything, entails no risk, and threatens the established social and economic consensus not at all. Redressing the imbalance that is demonstrated by the fatality rates of newborns, however, would pose all sorts of risks to our current status quo. This, I contend, is the difference.
That and, perhaps, a slightly warped moral compass that prefers the theoretically alive to the very real alive. Those who are not yet alive have only a theoretical demand upon our care and concern. Those who actually have been born, however, come situated with all sorts of racial and socio-economic baggage that allows us to ignore their plight because we can deem them of less worth, and therefore less in need of our concern.
