Reducing infant mortality is a complicated and daunting challenge, but it can be achieved through effective intervention. It's a matter of education and clinical care, as well as access to family planning services that allow women to choose when to become pregnant.
Currently, the states and insurers spend a lot of money on expensive neonatal care and other interventions aimed at mitigating the effects of poor birth outcomes. Yet these efforts have been at best only partly successful; infant mortality rates have remained essentially flat in recent years, and there's been no real progress in a decade. The city's plan, which is scheduled for release in December, will be a comprehensive strategy based on solid research to target resources toward improving the overall health of women.
Given what we now know about the causes of infant mortality, that's a strategy that makes sense if we are serious about making a dent in the infant mortality rate, a stubbornly intractable social ill whose victims are the most vulnerable members of our society.
