Magazine

In Memphis’ Shelby County Cemetery, there’s a place they call Babyland. More than 10,000 infants are buried there, left to the public cemetery by families who couldn’t afford to take them anywhere else. The babies are tucked away in small coffins, and most of their plots are marked with metal discs engraved with numbers, but not names.

Memphis is known for a lot of things: its sweet barbecue sauce, its blues singers and Elvis, its Beale Street nightlife, and in some circles, its high infant mortality rate.

Babies die for all sorts of reasons. They get diarrhea and dehydrate; they catch pneumonia and their lungs are overwhelmed; or they are born prematurely, before their bodies can handle life on the outside. Some deaths are predictable, others sudden. But infant mortality rates are definitely higher in poorer countries: Angola has a rate of 180 deaths (before age one) per 1,000 live births, while Sweden has a rate of 2.75.

But the correlation between a country’s wealth and its infant mortality rate is not necessarily a strict one. The U.S., the richest country in the world, has a rate of 6 — at the lower end of the spectrum, but higher than that of about 40 countries. And in parts of the U.S. and for certain populations, the infant mortality rates are much higher. Shelby County, Tenn., where Memphis is the main municipality, is one of those places. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, 193 infants died, making the county’s overall infant mortality rate 12.7 — or twice the national average. And the infant mortality rate for black babies in Shelby County is 17.8. Nationally, black women are twice as likely to have a child that will die before its first birthday than white women. Even when you control for income and education level, the disparity stands.