Infant Mortality Rates In Detroit Now Higher Than Those In Mexico, Thailand, China

Detroit’s 60-year deterioration has taken a toll not just on business owners, investors and taxpayers. It’s meant misery for its most vulnerable: children and the women who bear them.

While infant mortality fell for decades across the U.S., progress bypassed Detroit, which in 2012 saw a greater proportion of babies die before their first birthdays than any American city, a rate higher than in China, Mexico and Thailand. Pregnancy-related deaths helped put Michigan’s maternal mortality rate in the bottom fifth among states. One in three pregnancies in the city is terminated.

Women are integral to the city’s recovery. While officials have drawn up plans to eliminate blight, curb crime and attract jobs, businesses and residents, they’re also struggling to save mothers and babies. The abortion patients awaiting ultrasounds at the Scotsdale Women’s Center and the premature infants hooked to heart monitors at Hutzel Women’s Hospital must be cared for before the bankrupt city can heal itself.

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In Detroit, 60 percent of children live in poverty, according to U.S. census data. Nationwide, 22 percent do. The city had the lowest rate of adults working or looking for work -- 49.4 percent -- among 41 cities examined in 2012 by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Physically larger than Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco combined, just 700,000 people call it home, down 60 percent from 1950. Public transportation is unreliable, and 26 percent of households lack a vehicle, compared with 9 percent nationally, according to the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Transportation Research Institute. That makes for an immobile population, hard for medical workers to reach and with few resources of its own for visiting doctors. Overall life expectancy is the lowest of the top 25 most populous metropolitan areas.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-11/babies-pay-for-detroit-s-fall-with-mortality-above-mexico.html