More Babies Dying In Major US City Than In Mexico

In Detroit, more babies die before their first birthdays than any American city, a rate higher than in Mexico, China and Thailand, and due to poverty, the abortion rate is spiking at an alarming rate.

Detroit’s 60-year deterioration has meant misery for its most vulnerable: children and women who bear them.

Hardly a ‘Choice’

“Detroit is a bad place,” said Crystal Cook, 20, as she waited for an appointment at Scotsdale Women’s Center for an ultrasound to learn if her pregnancy was normal or needed to be terminated.

Almost half of Detroit women who remain pregnant have inadequate prenatal care, according to a Skillman report. That often leads to premature birth, the leading cause of infant mortality, whose rate hit 15 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2012, state data show.

That’s the highest of any U.S. city and more than double the national average, hardly a “choice.”

In 2012, Detroit women had 5,693 abortions out of 18,249 pregnancies, according to state statistics. The rate rose to 37.9 per 1,000 women that year, up from 27.5 in 2001.

Fewer women use contraception in Detroit while more are having abortions – 16.9 per 1,000 women in 2011 — since the procedure was legalized in 1973, according to the New York-based Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health researcher.

Abortion patients from Detroit say they are unable to afford birth control, according to interviews conducted last week.

Men in the city are “out of control. Most have no jobs and cannot provide.

“Basically in Detroit, women have to do everything themselves,” Cook said.

Infant mortality has fallen for decades across the U.S., but pregnancy-related deaths put Michigan’s maternal mortality rate in the bottom fifth among states, worse than in Mexico.

In Detroit, one in three pregnancies in the city is terminated. 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.

Mothers’ poverty-related depression and obesity, diabetes and poor nutrition harm infants even before they are born.

“If you have families that are suffering, who aren’t going to work, who aren’t being trained for jobs, they’re never going to be taxpayers,” said Gilda Jacobs, a former state senator from suburban Huntington Woods who heads the Michigan League for Public Policy. “You need a holistic approach to improving a city. You need jobs, you need good infrastructure, you need transportation, you need good schools — and you need healthy human capital.”

If Detroit focused on renewable energy solutions, including building wind turbines as Van Jones had recommended, it could put its citizens back to work. That is not happening, however, and the women and children suffer the most.

Making matters worse, the city is opting to prevent its citizens their right to food. “Adding insult to injury, land owners in one of the most socio-economically depressed cities in the nation are now told they cannot grow their own food, according to a new state ruling that violates the human right to adequate food. The new ruling has backyard farmers upset and is opposed by environmental groups. Opposition by human rights groups might benefit Michiganders.”

See: Outrage: Right To Farm Stripped, Right To Food Violated

“I can make ends meet, but have no room to save,” said Cook, who was 12 weeks and four days pregnant.

Her father and two friends helped pay the $275 she owed for the procedure at the Scotsdale Women’s Center on the northwest side, she said, and her sister drove her there.

Cook didn’t graduate from high school, she said, and now travels 90 minutes each way by bus to work at an auto-wire company, earning $9 an hour, about $280 a week after taxes.

Not only do many women have no opportunity to learn about family planning, they are als encouraged by peers or relatives to have babies when young or unmarried, said Danita Jackson, a social worker at Cody High School.

“She recalled a tearful talk with a 15-year-old who bore a second child 10 months after her first,” Bloomberg reports.

“A baby having a baby,” she said. “A lot of these young ladies have absent parents or parents that are not really parenting them, giving them guidance.”

Source: Bloomberg News