September 21, 2017
By Christopher Ingraham
The fertility rate in Flint, Mich., (click here) dropped precipitously after the city decided to switch to lead-poisoned Flint River water in 2014, according to a new working paper.
That decline was primarily driven by what the authors call a “culling of the least healthy fetuses” resulting in a “horrifyingly large” increase in fetal deaths and miscarriages. The paper estimates that among the babies conceived from November 2013 through March 2015, “between 198 and 276 more children would have been born had Flint not enacted the switch in water,” write health economists Daniel Grossman of West Virginia University and David Slusky of Kansas University.
In April 2014, Flint decided to draw its public water supply from the Flint River, a temporary measure intended to save costs while the city worked on a permanent pipeline project to Lake Huron. Residents immediately began complaining about the odor and appearance of the water, but well into 2015, the city was still assuring residents that the water was safe to drink....
The tragedy never ends. It goes on and on and on. The State of Michigan needs to be sued.
Fetal death (click here) refers to the spontaneous intrauterine death of a fetus at any time during pregnancy. Fetal deaths later in pregnancy (at 20 weeks of gestation or more, or 28 weeks or more, for example) are also sometimes referred to as stillbirths. In the United States, State laws require the reporting of fetal deaths, and Federal law mandates national collection and publication of fetal death data. Most states report fetal deaths of 20 weeks of gestation or more and/or 350 grams birthweight. However, a few states report fetal deaths for all periods of gestation. Fetal death data is published annually by the National Center for Health Statistics, in reports and as individual-record data files.
