Memphis Fights Its Infant Mortality Rate

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- The first thing you notice is how tiny they are: Row upon row of babies, some no older than this day, hooked to grotesque jumbles of tubes. Press your palm against the incubator wall and the infant inside disappears from view.

It takes a while for something much sadder to occur to you: In a room full of newborns, dozens of them, there is no crying. The sound of beeping heart monitors, the rustle and murmur of observing doctors, but no crying.

"They're too small and too sick to cry," explains a passing nurse.

This is the newborn intensive care unit of the Regional Medical Center of Memphis, universally known around this city as The Med, perhaps two miles from the blues clubs and rib joints of Beale Street.

And these are the children with a fighting chance.

Some of them, a small fraction, will join the sparse field of little corpses buried in wooden boxes at the county cemetery, distinguished only by little metal plates and identification numbers, perhaps remembered with a stray and shriveled balloon.

Others will go home with mothers in a few days, a week, a year, and they will begin a life fighting impossible odds in this city's worst neighborhoods, forging a struggle against poverty entrenched for generations.

A 2002 federal report put this city at the top of the list for infant deaths in American cities: 692 dead babies over a four-year span, a rate of more than 15 deaths for every 1,000 births, more than twice the U.S. average.

Broken down by ZIP code, centering on the poorest places in this very poor city, there are spots where babies die at a higher rate than they do in some Third World countries.

Some health officials object to that characterization because the figures are small enough to call their statistical significance into question. But no one denies that there is an epidemic of dead babies here.

It is difficult to explain exactly why. It is even more difficult to say whether it will get significantly better any time soon.

Ask people here about their city and they are quick to acknowledge the problems _ particularly poverty and racial disharmony, the one exacerbating the other for decades.