The first quarter of the decade brought a spate of reports on the quality of life in America. In January a study by Harlem Hospital, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, reported one astounding fact: Men in Bangladesh have a better chance of living past age 40 than men in Harlem. A major urban area in the world's most powerful nation has surpassed in one critical negative indicator a small country whose very name has for years conjured up images of malnutrition and mortality.
Two months later the Census Bureau for the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families released a report which concluded that children in the United States are at greater risk for a number of social, economic, and health problems than children in the world's other developed nations. According to the report, the United States and Australia have the highest child-poverty rate among industrialized nations, and young U.S. males are five times more likely to be murdered than their counterparts in other developed countries. America's youth are also affected in higher proportions by divorce and teenage pregnancy.
On the heels of that report came another, the annual study of the nation's health by the Department of Health and Human Services, released March 23. While the study showed that, overall, Americans are staying healthier and living longer, it also showed a growing disparity between the health of black Americans and white Americans.
While white life expectancy averages 75.5 years, life expectancy for blacks is 69.5 years. For black men it is 65.1, more than 10 years below the national average for whites. Black men are seven times more likely to die of homicide than white men, and black women are more than four times more likely than white women to be murdered.
The number of AIDS cases among blacks rose from 25 percent of all AIDS cases in 1984 to 29 percent in 1988. As of last September, black children made up 55 percent of all AIDS sufferers under the age of 13.
In 1987, the latest year for which statistics were available, white children died at the rate of 8.6 per 1,000 live births, down three-tenths of a point from 1986. The infant mortality rate for blacks was more than twice as high, at 17.9 deaths per 1,000. The high U.S. infant mortality rate ranks our nation a humiliating 22nd among industrialized countries.
IN LATE JANUARY A DISTURBING little news item appeared in The Washington Post. It stated that, according to the General Accounting Office, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) altered a study to play down the beneficial effects of a federal food program for low-income pregnant women and their children called WIC (Women, Infants and Children).
Under the WIC program, some 3.4 million women and children up to age 5 receive food to ensure proper nutrition. Researchers found that the food aided maternal weight gain, reduced premature births and infant mortality, and positively affected fetal head size with potential for improved brain development and cognitive performance later among children.
Such conclusions, however, were not found in the USDA report. Suspicion exists as to whether the study was altered in an attempt to head off congressional efforts to enlarge the program, or, as some members of Congress have long advocated, to make it an entitlement for all those eligible.
The study itself cost $5.9 million -- to discover that pregnant women who eat nourishing food have healthier babies, who do better in school if they also eat well. Think of the food that $5.9 million could have bought.
Two decades ago Jean Mayer, president of Tufts University, was asked to chair the then newly created National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States. In a recent address to Congress, he reported on the progress in the years following the creation of the council. He then talked about the $12 billion that was cut from food programs between 1981 and 1984, when military spending skyrocketed during the first Reagan administration.
"Scientifically documented evidence shows that every dollar spent on WIC saves three dollars in health costs in the same year," said Mayer. "Women who do not eat well during pregnancy have 30 to 40 percent more low-birth-weight infants. It costs $1,000 to $2,000 a day to keep a premature baby in an incubator. You [can buy] a lot of food for that money." He added that babies born underweight are more likely to have permanent defects or to be mentally retarded.
In Mayer's state of Massachusetts, the lifetime cost of care for a retarded person averages $2.5 million. "Humanitarian concerns aside, not to feed a pregnant woman is a foolish way to try to save money," he concluded.
Such is the change in thinking that our nation must undergo. We must similarly channel our resources into schools and jobs, rather than paying on the other end for costly rehabilitation programs, police enforcement, and incarceration. Resources spent well to make our nation and its people stronger and healthier will not only save us all money in the long run, it will infuse this battered country with a sense of hope for the future, and with the pride that a nation of such diversity and creativity deserves.
We have seen too many tiny babies in incubators shaking with the tremors of crack addiction, witnessed too many youths murdered in our inner cities, watched entirely too much needless suffering. The question we must ask ourselves as a nation is this: Is this acceptable? If the answer is no, then there is only one other question: What are we going to do about it?
Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners.
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