Where in the world are babies at the lowest risk of dying?
85 comments
·June 3, 2025jandrewrogers
Spooky23
You have a few factors. Medicaid eligibility and more strongly location is a rough approximation for likelihood of complications or infant mortality.
I consulted for an opioid surveillance program several years ago at a large scale data analytics level.
It was very sobering - basically the scientists could score each pregnancy in the state on a scale of 0-100, where 0% was <5% probability of being born addicted and 100 was >95%.
Most addicted mothers got hooked on painkillers as a result of injury or sickness. The biggest factors were access to healthcare, access to transportation, and health insurance. “Bad” zip codes were like 10x more likely to have an opioid addiction and 25x more complications.
Being a new dad at the time, it really affected my view of politics in this space. I realized that as cynical as I am, it’s not enough.
bjoli
800 meters from where I live a comfortable life kids are born into a statistically shorter, poorer life with more disease, more mental unhealth and fewer healthy years.
People there live, on average, 4.5 years shorter than people where I live with something like 10 fewer healthy years.
The statistics comparing people born here and there are pretty awful. Despite having the same hospital, infant mortality rate is something like 2x (although the statistical uncertainty is high).
How is this not a failure of society? In addition: I live in a country with pretty high social mobility, especially compared to the US...
vhcr
As does Japan, Ehime has a 0.9 / 1000 infant mortality rate, compared to 4.5 in Fukui.
ellisv
and that's just the state average - think about the variability within states too!
kbutler
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/infant_mortality_r...
I wonder how the consistent gestational period adjustments would affect the statistics for the various states.
amanaplanacanal
I've seen it reported recently that both infant and maternal mortality has gone up in states that have outlawed abortion. Even if the doctor forecasts that the pregnancy will be a risk to the mother or infant, they don't want to be second-guessed after the fact and prosecuted for performing the abortion.
iamtheworstdev
it's not just that - but obgyns are leaving states that ban abortions. which has led to entire maternity wards being shut down.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/pregnant-women-...
screamingninja
Can you share the report?
rayiner
The variations don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason. Adjacent red and blue states do similarly (Idaho/Oregon, Minnesota/Iowa, Utah/Colorado). But North Dakota and South Dakota are quite different. Many states do worse (MD/VA) do worse than poorer ones (Oregon).
rossant
French doctors and the government have expressed concern over the rising mortality rate in recent years. Some worry that a contributing factor may be the relatively low rate of C-sections. Difficult labor is a major risk factor for neonatal death. It is also associated with intracranial hemorrhages at birth, which are common, but even more frequent and severe after complicated deliveries. These hemorrhages are often linked to wrongful diagnoses of shaken baby syndrome, which is commonly assumed whenever an infant presents with intracranial bleeding. France is likely among the countries with the highest rates of such misdiagnoses. Obvious to say the consequences for the child and their parents are severe.
otherme123
Weird that some countries with high C-section rates are not particularly good in mortality (Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland), while the best countries by mortality has low C-section rates, Norway being the country with the lowest rate in the world.
Curiously, France has almost the exact same rate than Finland (200 per 1000 births), which tops the mortality list.
rossant
Perhaps a distinction should be made in the data between emergency and planned C-sections.
Maxion
Meanwhile, in Finland, midwives here are worried abou the increase in C-sections in the last few years. It is most likely a cause of the decrease in funding towards healthcare, causing understaffed maternety wards and a push for c-sections on slow labor.
867-5309
>the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan — include all live births
>A baby in the UK, France, or the US can be two to three times more likely to die than one in Japan or Finland
why do they reference the UK while none of the graphs feature the UK?
oliwarner
This took me a minute too.
The opening graph is from the Office for National Statistics. The ONS is a UK govt department. So there is some UK data in the article but this is first-year mortality, not first month.
The author does say:
> The precise birth data needed to produce these comparable rates is not available for all countries, so only a selection of OECD countries is shown.
Perhaps this is the reason.
I do agree though, it's mighty strange to have not included an interpretation of you're going to mention them in the text. Perhaps they were excluded after the text was written?
rwhitman
Japan, the Nordics, S. Korea and Central Europe, all countries with a demographic crisis. They need those babies.
e40
Curious that Taiwan is not listed. I understand they have a good healthcare system.
observationist
[flagged]
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roughly
This is a rock we’re going to have an increasingly hard time throwing at other countries.
Henchman21
While I agree with you, let’s not let the man babies in charge of the US get away unscathed. They are just as foolishly childish.
_DeadFred_
The article's item 3 would have to be backed up for me to take anything away from this. There have traditionally been very different methods for tracking this information, where countries drew lines, etc. When i did medical software (granted long ago) you could not compare data between the USA, France, or Japan in any useful way.
timewizard
Isn't the more appropriate question is where in the world are babies AND mothers at the lowest risks during all 9 months of gestation and then childbirth?
smeej
It's certainly another question, but the question of appropriateness seems to depend on context. I don't see what would make either more appropriate than the other in terms of "things a data analysis website might assess"?
timewizard
If you're improving newborn mortality by harming the mothers mortality then your model, at the very least, should not be blindly replicated.
Retric
That and any other interesting info is going to be swamped by natural abortions which end a large fraction of all human pregnancies ~40% everywhere.
smeej
This is looking entirely at the survival of children after birth. It even normalizes for situations where children are born before full-term.
What happens to postpartum mothers is certainly another question worth looking at, but the two questions are separate enough after birth that one can still be perfectly "relevant" without the other.
insane_dreamer
It would be interesting to see infant mortality rate as a function of GDP per capita -- that would tell you which countries make best use of their wealth to ensure the health of their citizens' children.
(It's not hard to guess which country would come out looking even worse than it already does in this table.)
null
amai
tldr;
"Japan, Sweden, and Finland are at the very bottom. They’re consistently among the best, even when we adjust for reporting inconsistencies. The other Nordic countries — Denmark and Norway — also have very low mortality rates."
homeless_engi
Tl;dr: Japan
TrackerFF
But more interestingly, Japan and the Nordics.
Interesting in the sense that the Nordics have a vastly different healthcare system than Japan.
ty6853
I have no idea how this tracks to births, but I did some studies before of Nordic homicide rate, and if you drop an actual Nordic citizen in similarly white homogenous states like new hampshire their murder rate isn't terribly worse than it is in a Nordic nation.
My hypothesis is there may be something like this effect happening, where once you control for nordic people in similarly white states I bet they'd have much closer to nordic birth risk.
const_cast
Ham-fisting statistics to support some model of eugenics and racially perfect societies is an old tale.
We need to be very careful with statistics, because rarely does one or even a dozen cover the whole picture. For example, in the US we can see that black individuals are more likely to commit crime. We could easily run with that and draw some unfavorable conclusions.
But, they're also much more likely to be impoverished, more likely to live in communities with low infrastructure funding, more likely to live in communities with drugs, more likely to have much poorer access to education, and more likely to face barriers to employment.
tokai
What about looking at economic strata instead at ethnicity?
keybored
The Nordics is where American conservatives and liberals find unity on harmonious white homogenity.
> My hypothesis is there may be something like this effect happening, where once you control for nordic people in similarly white states I bet they'd have much closer to nordic birth risk.
That follows from murder rates? I don’t follow.
_DeadFred_
Historically (at least up until the late 90s) Japan, France and maybe others had a much different point of death included as death at birth that skewed infant mortality numbers. I'd like to see more than a bullet point 3 to understand how/when that was changed.
insane_dreamer
more precisely: Japan at the top, US at the bottom (among wealthy countries)
FirmwareBurner
Could it be that Japan is so incredibly clean everywhere? Metro stations there feel as clean as hospitals. Everyone wearing masks, etc.
pixl97
Probably not. It's much more likely more resources being provided during pregnancy, the country is very concerned about its current fertility rate.
mystified5016
More that the government understands they have a vested interest in caring for (as opposed to exploiting) its population.
That's why the US is always at the very bottom of rankings like this.
rwmj
Yes it's very obvious having spent much time in Japan that the government actually works for the people instead of regarding them as an inconvenience.
rayiner
The U.S. has beginning to end health care for pregnancy and child birth. Its infant mortality rate (5.4) isn’t really much higher than Canada (4.7), which has a socialized healthcare system.
bamboozled
They have a lot of pediatric doctors compared to the number of babies born, thus babies are receiving more attention ?
otherme123
Also parents being paid for raising their babies.
TacticalCoder
[dead]
Even within the US, infant mortality rates vary by almost 3x across individual States.