Detroit’s decline hard on moms, kids
DETROIT — The city’s 60-year deterioration has taken a toll not just on business owners, investors and taxpayers. It’s meant misery for its most vulnerable: children and the women who bear them.
While infant mortality fell for decades across the U.S., progress bypassed Detroit, which in 2012 saw a greater proportion of babies die before their first birthdays than any American city, a rate higher than in China, Mexico and Thailand. Pregnancy-related deaths helped put Michigan’s maternal mortality rate in the bottom fifth among states. One in three pregnancies in the city is terminated.
Women are integral to the city’s recovery. While officials have drawn up plans to eliminate blight, curb crime and attract jobs, businesses and residents, they’re also struggling to save mothers and babies. The abortion patients awaiting ultrasounds at the Scotsdale Women’s Center and the premature infants hooked to heart monitors at Hutzel Women’s Hospital must be cared for.
“Detroit is a bad place,” said Crystal Cook, 20, as she waited for an appointment at Scotsdale. Men in the city are “out of control. Most of them don’t have jobs, most of them couldn’t provide. Basically in Detroit, women have to do everything themselves.” City Life
The crisis transcends the personal, said Gilda Jacobs, a former state senator from suburban Huntington Woods who heads the Michigan League for Public Policy.
“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,” she said. “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.”
A campaign called Make Your Date begun last month is the latest attempt to prevent premature births, the leading cause of infant deaths, with hormone therapy and counselling. Short-Lived
The effort must counter an economic and social slide in the former auto capital that resulted in a record $18 billion municipal bankruptcy.
In Detroit, 60 per cent of children live in poverty, according to U.S. census data. Nationwide, 22 per cent do.
The city had the lowest rate of adults working or looking for work — 49.4 per cent — 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 per cent from 1950.
Public transportation is unreliable, and 26 per cent of households lack a vehicle, compared with nine per cent nationally, according to the AnnArbor,Michigan-basedTransportation Research Institute. That makes for an immobile population, hard for medical workers to reach and with few resources of its own for visiting doctors. Overall life expectancy is the lowest of the top 25 most populous metropolitan areas. Race Matters
Health isn’t determined just by poverty, but by race, which plays a disproportionate role in Detroit. Blacks composed 84 per cent of residents in 2010, according to the census.
Black babies in neighbourhoods with the lowest poverty level are more likely to die than white infants in neighbourhoods with the highest poverty, according to a state report last year. In 2010, non-whites made up 21 per cent of Michigan’s population but 43 per cent of infant deaths.