ABSTRACT
The choice of infant mortality as a topic for the Sixth Cornell Health Policy Conference indicates the importance attached to the subject. Yet, infant mortality contributes only a small amount to yearly deaths in the US. An important characteristic of infant mortality is its persistently strong association with social and economic circumstances. Because infant mortality rates have loomed so large in the history of both health policy and public concern, they have sometimes assumed a life of their own, divorced from the dull realities of the data upon which they are based. The infant mortality rate is viewed as a social and economic phenomenon. Control for birthweight removes most of the association of social class and race with infant mortality. A perhaps surprising aspect of the trends in infant mortality since 1950 is that the patterns are quite similar in most industrialized nations. Thus, most of the Western world participated in the faster decline in infant mortality of the 1970s.
