Capital Crime: Black Infant Mortality in America (Frontiers of Anthropology)

By Margaret S. Boone

Why do more than 10,000 Black American infants die before their first birthdays each year? What can be done to ameliorate the problem of high infant mortality rates? Capital Crime describes, analyzes, and explains the social, cultural, historical, and present-day health factors involved in record-high rates of infant mortality, low birthweight, and compromised health among disadvantaged Black women in Washington, D.C. Using results from a NSF-supported study and material from a follow-up study supported by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, this volume develops and tests four reproductive profiles from the inner city: the teen mother, the older mother, women without men, and a model for advantaged women in a disadvantaged environment. Margaret S. Boone highlights the fact that public health policies need to be tailored to serve a variety of at risk groups. Boone then provides some key suggestions for policy change that would rectify the "capital crime′′ of high infant mortality rates improving prenatal care, changing public health education, building stronger social support networks, and improving health care tracking systems. This volume should be of interest to a wide range of specialists and students in public health, medicine, race and ethnic studies, family planning, social services, counseling, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. "This is an important book, well done and disturbing. . . .It provides an excellent application of cultural analysis to infant mortality, combining qualitative and quantitative data in a complex mix of methods and perspectives that includes factor analysis, cluster analysis, case histories, and ethnography. It considers the human meaning of statistics to produce a social epidemiology that illuminates the causes and conditions of this major social problem."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803933738
• ISBN13: 9780803933736
• Release Date: June 1989
• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.