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Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

The real shame in that number is that other countries literally let premature babies die without intervention so they can keep their health costs down and infant mortality numbers down too while the US aggressively intervenes and reports all births massively inflating our infant mortality numbers.

Basically, if you are going to be a premature baby, you would much rather be born in the US than any other country in the world.

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The first of the numbers (rate of mothers dying) would not be affected at all by what you mention, and the second (rate of children under age of 5 dying), while affected by infant mortality (number of deaths of infants under 1 year old), is a much wider metric, so the effect is also relatively small.

Either way, I'd be interested in seeing some sources for those claims, as it's the first I've heard of it happening, at least in the developed world. And I mean it sincerely, since it's a topic of interest to me.

Doctors stand by as babies perish because they're concerned about their nation's WHO rankings? Citation needed.

I'd say its is more of an institutional bias again costs and perception that drive policies that prevent intervention when babies are born too young or too underweight. That's how the you get the horror stories of "my baby was born X days too early/Y pounds too underweight and they refused to do anything."

Data, or it didn't happen.

I've literally never heard any such story. Online or in my circles.

Again, [citation needed].

I was born over eight weeks premature, in 1989, in South Africa.

I got lucky, sure. But "any other country" letting premature babies die without intervention is perhaps too broad a claim.

My daughter was born 8 weeks premature in Germany. She was considered an extremely unproblematic case (though without medical attention, she probably wouldn't have made it).

On the same ward, we had at least one 700 gram baby that was doing fine, and several that were close to that. So agree, the parent's claim is definitely way too broad.

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