Why is that rate so high?

Patricia McBee of Houston says we shouldn't be talking politics on health care reform when we have one of the highest infant mortality rates of any industrialized nation. I don't know the statistics, but perhaps our infant mortality rate is high because we seem to have so many parents who kill their babies. Andrea Yates, Darlie Routier, Susan Smith, Deanna Laney, Deena Schlosser, Walter Reed Booker (who cut his 6-month-old great-granddaughter in a dispute with his grandson over who ate all the sausage biscuits), Isaac Daniel Bigley and Leanne Donovan (who police say savagely beat their 4-month-old in the "worst child abuse case" they'd ever seen), and the list goes on and on. Maybe if we concentrated on implementing the death penalty a little more consistently, our infant mortality rate would go down dramatically.

There's also another reason for the disparity. The countries she's comparing us to don't count babies for statistical reports until they're 6 months or a year old. The U.S. does. Our rate would be a lot lower, too, if we just discounted that first year of life.

"Results prove we need reform." The Dallas Morning News; December 4, 2009; p. 24A.