As we all know, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt opted out of the usual Hollywood birth and instead went to a rather unusual location, Namibia, one of the world’s poorest countries, for the birth of their daughter. Although Jolie has been known to do many a strange thing (look at the kid’s name), this has got to be one of her strangest acts yet!  Yet despite the fact that the child was born in one of the world’s poorest countries, where few people have access to medical care, why is it that no one held their breath over the safety of the birth of a Jolie-Pitt baby? 

The sad truth is that while proud dad Brad flew back and forth between Cannes premier theatres and the hospital, Namibia sat quietly in the back row as one of the poorest countries in the world.  In Namibia, 48 infants out of 1000 births die (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_series_results.asp?rowID=562), 35 percent of the people earn less than one dollar a day and overall life expectancy is a mere 48 years (you can learn more at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_results.asp?crID=516&fID=r15).  Jolie no doubt chose Namibia as her birth site in part to attract attention to the conditions in the country, though she herself chose to buy her way around the horrors of poverty surrounding her.  We can’t be too harsh on Angelina, as others with money in Namibia do the same thing; those with money in the developing world buy good health care and those without die.

But the good news is that Namibia is nearly 7,000 miles from here, almost literally a world away with its nasty economics deciding whose baby will live and whose baby will die.  Pretty sad, that nasty developing world rich-poor gap, especially when it affects innocent kids.  Pass me the remote.

Yet the truth of Namibia is all too true also in the United States, where those with money buy their children’s survival and those without watch their children die.  In the US right now the wealthier half of our population experience 5.8 deaths per 1000 births, while the poorest Americans see 14.4 deaths occur among newborns per 1000 births.  This is taking into account only those who gave birth at a hospital, where such grim statistics are kept.  There are many at the very bottom of our society who can’t afford even the cheapest hospitals and simply give birth at home and hope for the best (you can see more statistics at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5115a4.htm). 

Infant mortality is one of the more sensitive measures of a community’s health since data can be tracked in increments of months as opposed to years, said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) on the internet (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/now/dec10/apha_infant.html). He pointed to a number of factors that may be associated, including women receiving less prenatal care or losing their jobs, cuts to nutrition programs, and climbing poverty rates.

I tried to think of a smart and witty comment about Jolie or her weirdly named kid to end this article with but I couldn’t.  Angelina had her baby in Africa to make us all think about the problems with health care there, but instead she ended up making me angry about the problems with access to health care right here.