Andrea Flynn at Next New Deal writes
Embarrassing U.S. maternal mortality figures are closely tied to extreme economic inequality. An excerpt:
Imagine that each year six U.S. passenger jets crashed, killing all passengers on board. Imagine that every person who died on those planes was a woman who was pregnant or recently gave birth. Instead of offering interventions and regulations that might prevent more planes from falling from the sky, lawmakers attempted to defund and repeal the very programs meant to improve air safety. That, in a nutshell, is the maternal mortality crisis in the United States.
Today, more U.S. women die in childbirth and from pregnancy-related causes than at almost any point in the last 25 years. The United States is the one of only seven countries in the entire world that has experienced an increase in maternal mortality over the past decade (we join the likes of Afghanistan and South Sudan), and mothers in Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia and Greece (among many other countries) have a better chance of surviving pregnancy than do women in the United States.
It should be no surprise that maternal mortality rates (MMRs) have risen in tandem with poverty rates. The two are inextricably linked. Women living in the lowest-income areas in the United States are twice as likely to suffer maternal death, and states with high rates of poverty have MMRs 77 percent higher than states with fewer residents living below the federal poverty level. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women, and in some U.S. cities the MMR among Black women is higher than in some sub-Saharan African countries.
New research suggests that one of the many factors driving this crisis might be inequality. We may have just celebrated the dawn of 2015, but in terms of economic inequality it might as well be 1929, the last time the United States experienced such an extraordinary gulf between the rich and the, well, everyone else. Today nearly one in three Blacks and one in four Hispanics (compared to one in ten whites) live in poverty, and in certain states those percentages are even higher. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the net worth of the poorest Americans has decreased and stagnant wages and increased debt has driven more middle class families into poverty. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans have enjoyed remarkable gains in wealth and income. Those in the top one percent have seen their incomes increase by as much as 200.5 percent over the past 30 years, while those in the bottom 99 percent have seen their incomes grow by only 18.9 percent during that same time.
As the financial well-being of the majority of Americans has eroded, so too has their health. A recent study conducted by Amani Nuru-Jeter from University of California, Berkeley shows that inequality has very different impacts on Black and white Americans. The study found that each unit increase in income inequality results in an additional 27 to 37 deaths among African Americans, and—interestingly—417 to 480 fewer deaths among white Americans. Nuru-Jeter and her colleagues were surprised to discover the inverse relationship between inequality and death for whites, and suggested that more research is needed to better understand it. “We do know that the proportion of high-income people compared to low-income people is higher for whites than for African Americans. It’s possible that the protective effects we are seeing represent the net effect of income inequality for high-income whites,” she said.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Support These Troops:
When a coal miner goes underground, he knows he is going into danger. The training that you get on the first day in the mines is designed to force you face to face with the worst that came happen—dust that can destroy your lungs, dangerous equipment and electrical lines hiding in the gloom, buildups of gas that can suffocate or lead to devastating explosions, and the horrifying idea that the tons of rock above your head might come crashing down.
Against those fears, the miner must trust the people operating the mine. He has to trust that their engineering is sound, that they are monitoring for dangerous gases, and that they've designed the mines entries and panels so that the roof is well supported. He also has to trust the government. Trust that the mine is being regularly inspected, and that attempts to take shortcuts on safety are met with swift, severe penalties that are large enough to discourage repeats of that behavior.
Unfortunately, over the last seven years both those trusts have been betrayed. When the Crandall Canyon mine collapsed last summer, the mine owner swore that he was not responsible.
Tweet of the Day
Every Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in
here, or you can download the
Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio."
High Impact Posts. This Week's High Impact Posts. Top Comments