The difference is that many blacks do NOT take very good care of their children. No one wants to admit it, but it’s true.
A paper presented at the latest meeting of the American Public Health Association by two sociologists and reported in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical association presents what might seem, at first glance, to be a paradox.
The contrast was most striking between immigrant Vietnamese women, with infant mortality rates of 5.5 deaths per 1,000 live births, and African American women, with rates of 16.3 deaths per 1,000. The JAMA article was titled “Born in the USA: Infant Health Paradox.”
The authors concluded that the viability of the newborns was harmed more by the unhealthful behavior of the American mothers than by the poverty and late prenatal care of the immigrant women. The socioeconomic advantages of the U.S.-born women were overshadowed by their medical illnesses and by their psychosocial pathology.
The true paradox in all of this is not that unhealthy and self-destructive behavior of pregnant women is worse than poverty and late prenatal care for the health of the fetus and newborn, but that health care researchers and journalists should be surprised at these findings. Practicing physicians take this for granted. The further one gets from the ivory towers of academic medicine, the more one realizes that quality and access of medical care matter less to health outcomes than does the health-related behavior of individuals.