"There is a frightening graph in a recent article in Health Affairs by David Kindig and Erika Cheng. Kindig and Cheng looked at trends in male and female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in 3,140 US counties.
What they found was that female mortality rates increased in 42.8% of counties (male mortality rates increased in only 3.4%). The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened.
You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006?
Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest."
Read the rest from Bill Gardner posting at The Incidental Economist here.
And although they are certainly not the same as overall female mortality rates, here are the latest CIA World Factbook figures on maternal mortality rates (MMR) per hundred thousand. Obviously the lower the number the better.
Hey, don't complain, thank God we're not like Chad or Somalia right? And how come all those socialist single payer countries are nearer the bottom, and they do it so much more cheaply?
Perhaps some neo-liberal hack can explain the economic principles of freedom involved to the child of a dead mother.
I know what comrade Stalin's or Herr Hitler's answer would have been about deaths and large numbers with regard to the needs of the state. Funny how the extremes tend to converge
