The US may have the most expensive and decadent medical system, but has some of the worst birthing practices in the western world.

If C-section rates thru the roof, plus every kind of dangerous intervention are not enough, you’ve got premature weaning and the carving off of pieces from a baby boy’s genitals.

Intellectual curiosity? Hope that the good result could be replicated in populations with worse outcomes?

I dont think it has to do with adaptation, maybe you can link it to religion and the respect and care catholicism emphasizes on life (pro-life theology) causes on the pregnant mothers, their families and in effect the baby. Has age of the mothers considered in this survey? It maybe naturally tilted by the fact that many educated african american families decide on fewer kids as compared to the not-so-educated (or not-so-well to do) African American families (or non-families for that matter).

Does anyone think that the single mother stress might be a reason for overall high infant mortality?

I have yet to see someone who is able to explain why Mexican Americans have such a low infant mortality rate, and I have yet to see a study that is able to thoroughly measure how racism effects infant mortality in Black women. I think the reason that we don’t know why Chicanas do so well, and African Americans do so poorly is methodological. Demographers tend to use large scale surveys, that ask broad questions. They need to do more poarticipant oberservation, and more in-depth interviews with women of color to see how these things operate.

Marcus:
As you can see in the charts above, the combined stillbirth and infant mortality rate is only 60% higher in the US than in Iceland.

Yes, but I was talking about the infant mortality rate, the exact reason for using Iceland (a Nordic country) as example is the fact that according to OECD factbook the reporting practices are similar in Nordic countries, and so there’s no need to assume that the “combined” rate does tell us more about the real differences.
Perhaps I should have used “Nordic countries” instead of Iceland as it might look like I’m cherrypicking a small country in order to make differences look more dramatic.

However, we might very well include stillbirths and the rest of west Europe in order to accurately compare facts and it will essentially make no difference as Amp pointed out.

And Brandon: Singapore? Apparently they have good, largely privatized healthcare system in many respects. Good for them.
When I implied that Nordic countries might have better healthcare systems the major point was not meant to be that they are “socialized”. Obviously the actual quality and amount of healthcare for infants and pregnant women are the things that matter as far as these statistics are concerned, not how the system is funded.

Furthermore about Singapore, it does not apply identical kind of healthcare than USA despite being largely privatized, and so it is absolutely no need to make any allowances for anyone, nor it does even remotely prove or even imply anything about the quality of US system.

It not also not true that Singapore does better than Nordic countries (or Iceland) “by the same margin” than they do better than USA.
Percentages might be misleading because of the nature of the phenomenon of infant mortality: there are x number of deaths that are simply not preventable by current technology. All we know about x is that it is probably smaller than the lowest infant mortality rate in the world (in Singapore) of 2,29 deaths /1000 births.
Therefore I would say that while Singaporean achievements are extremely impressive, the difference between the infant mortality rate of 2,29/1000 (Singapore) versus 3,29/1000 (Iceland) and 6,43/1000 (USA) versus 3,29/1000 is not similar.
You were of course combining the stillbirths to these rates, and then Singapore does vastly better than Iceland with 5,29 versus 8,29, but on the other hand if we compare the best Nordic country with the best country with partially private healthcare system, Sweden would score 5,76/1000, virtually the same as Singapore.
Fortunately for my “Nordic patriotism”, Sweden also actually outperforms Singapore in some respects, for example, Singapore somehow has fifteen times the maternal mortality rate of Sweden. Source, pages 32-33.
Even the US had lower maternal mortality in 2000.

I would not hesitate to say that the healthcare system of Singapore is certainly superior in every way if the differences between the national health indicators between it and West Europe would be as big as differences between Europe an USA are. They are not.
While claiming that European countries have better systems than US is indeed quite a strong statement that does perhaps not adequately take real cultural and genetic differences in account, I feel that it is justified by the consistently better outcomes.
Known cultural differences like education, incomes (significantly higher in USA), smoking, drug use etc. do not explain these.

As for what could be done, it is my understanding that despite big efforts via medicare the access for professional healthcare during pregnancy is still inferior in USA, either because of costs or the fact that private insurance does not cover simple monitoring adequatedly.

It would be ethically very sound if fetuses and infants would be completely exempt for “healthcare is a privilege, not a right” -policy as it hard to take personal responsibility for getting the best care possible at that point of life.
-Universal care of the same kind than countries with best outcomes for this age group, funded with combination of mandatory expenses for middle and high income patients (parents) and taxes.

Of course, you could say that it’s due to genetic and/or cultural differences, and not to its mostly privatized medical system. But then you’d have to make the same allowances for the US.

Hint: the hypothesis previously mentioned does contain the words “better” and “system”, because that is all we really need to know.

I am tempted to say something smart-alecky like; Well after all we are a little different from Iceland, since we aren’t living on a glacier floating around in the Atlantic Ocean. However, you may be on to something when you say “better — system” I think there are a lot of studies going on concerning health care disparities. http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/nhdr03/nhdrsum03.htm#Findings If they can reveal some evidence as to the causes of these disparities, maybe something can be done about it.
So far they show plenty of disparities, but the causes seem difficult to pin down. Is it class or race based, due to lack of good doctoring, lack of proper medical facilities, lack of cultural competency on the part of care givers, problems due to life style or culture of patients, genetics of patients, or what? Maybe it is a combination.
Then what can be done?
It looks like we are at the mercy of healthcare academics and professionals who are trying to devise a better systems based approach, so I lend them my skeptical support. No use getting a coronary yourself worrying about it though.

This subject is well worn. A cogent explanation for persistence of these statistical gaps is not known.

Indeed. We don’t really know anything “cogently”. Some philosophers even claim that the phrase cogito ergo sum is a syllogistic inference , as it appears to require extra premise.

However, theres no need to make this that hard.

Here’s what we know:
1. Other industrial countries, for example Iceland, has 2,5 times smaller infant mortality rate than US.
2. Iceland has fundamentally different system for providing healthcare to (pregnant) women and newborns.

Now it is entirely possible to come up with a logical hypothesis why this is so.
Most remarkably, the same hypothesis also provides us with a theoretically if not practically simple solution.

So when it is claimed that:

I don’t see anything in the way of concrete proposals coming from the critics, just the usual angst and outrage.

I wonder if there is really a need to spell it out, as certainly most critics of the critics do understand what the obviously implied solution would be.
Hint: the hypothesis previously mentioned does contain the words “better” and “system”, because that is all we really need to know.

The black rate of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is nearly 2.5 times the white rate, oddly enough. Why would that be? Poor sleeping habits?

Black babies also had higher rates of congenital malformations or chromosomal deformities. Any ideas here?

I know this does not answer your question about other countries, but it does say something about the long term effects of racism…

The long term effects of high fat diets, more likely.

Could be both. Seems like the best foods aren’t always available to the poor (as has been discussed here), and diet/low fat versions of high fat products can be prohibitively expensive.

But stress — really big factor in high blood pressure. I don’t see why its impact should be minimized, unless it’s part of a greater attempt to suggest that the stresses of racism don’t really exist.

Here is an interesting chart from the CDC….notice the difference between Black and Puerto Ricans and every other group The rankings of the causes of death are different.

Just as an interesting side note–on most major demogrpahic indicators Puerto Rican tend to be closer to African Americans than they are to other Latino groups.