Early births increase U.S. rate of infant deaths

ATLANTA — Premature births, often due to poor care of low-income pregnant women, are the main reason the U.S. infant-mortality rate is higher than in most European countries, a government report said Tuesday.

About 1 in 8 U.S. births is premature.

Early births are much less common in most of Europe; for example, only 1 in 18 babies is premature in Ireland and Finland.

Poor access to prenatal care, maternal obesity and smoking, too-early cesarean sections and induced labor and fertility treatments are among the reasons for preterm births, experts said.

Premature babies born before 37 weeks tend to be more fragile and have underdeveloped lungs, said the lead author of the new report, Marian MacDorman of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Premature births are the chief reason the U.S. ranks 30th in the world in infant mortality, with a rate more than twice as high as those in Sweden, Japan, Finland, Norway and the Czech Republic. If U.S. infants were as mature as Sweden's are at birth, nearly 8,000 infant deaths could be avoided and the U.S. infant-mortality rate would be about one-third lower than it is, according to a calculation by MacDorman and others at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics.

The report used 2005 statistics to make comparisons to 14 European countries. There is more recent data: International infant-mortality statistics for 2006 and 2007 indicate that since 2000, the U.S. rate has stood at about 7 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births.