Where's the Pain?

Perusing through some back-logged evolution news stories I came across one titled "Painful Labor: A Modern Thing". The author went on to say how in 2001 the remains of a pelvis were found from the fossils of a Homo Erectus female. The 1.2 million-year-old pelvis demonstrates how the birth canal of Homo Erectus is considerably larger - about 30% - than the average women's you would find today. Anthropolgists previously estimated the last batch of large canals occurred around 2.4 million-years-ago. 

It was interesting because the author exclaimed that this demonstrates that birthing pains are more of a recent adaptation - only within 1.4 million years have female pelvises narrowed as opposed to 2.4 mya. The author even went as far to state that a few million years ago babies might have just slid right out - rolling of eyes appropriate here.

Although, as one observant commenter pointed out, this article had it all wrong. Labor pains aren't normally derived from the pelvis, they are born from muscle contractions of the cervix. So besides being a tepid article at best, the author was also misguided in her importance of the find. The importance of the find is that it helps connect the dots to our distant past. That's about it.

However, there is a terribly painful thing about labor that came to mind and is very apparent in the US: infant mortality rates. Among industrialized first-world nations the Centers for Disease Control ranked "the United States 29th globally in infant mortality in 2004, the latest year such data were available for all countries", according to a MedScape article commenting on the subject.

The average US infant mortality rate is close to 7 out of every 1000 births. Thats down from nearly 20:1000 in 1970. African-American women have the highest rate at almost 14:1000 births. Next sits Native Americans and Puerto Ricans at just over 8:1000. Whites at over 5:1000 and Cubans at the lowest with just over 4:1000. 

So where's the pain? Although overall rates have gone down these facts still reveal some of the major troubles facing our health care system.  Why as the country who spends the most money per person on health care are we still ranked 29th in terms of infant mortality? Why does there exist such prominent gaps in health-access and disease between people of different race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc?  Why are there over 46 million U.S. citizens without health care? However complicated they may be, these are problems we can fix. Aren't they? 

- m.tsang