Commentary: All the presidents' children

Abstract

There is a difference between Democrat and Republican administrations. That difference can be measured in many ways. Whether you think the difference is great or slight, very much depends on from where you are looking. Looking from within the USA, the differences can appear huge. The increasing polarization in voting patterns within that vast country is recently becoming more evident as every presidential election takes place. So too are the growing disdain and contempt with which supporters of these two political parties appear to hold each other and those they consider each other’s natural supporters. Rodriguez, Bound and Geronimus’s paper shows that there is now another way in which the growing differences between Republican and Democrat administrations are becoming more apparent. All else taken into account, some 3% more infants die each year when a Republican president is the resident of the White House as compared with when a Democrat is incumbent. Democrat presidents may not be messiahs, but Republicans ones, it transpires, are worse. The USA is one of the most populous countries in the world, has one of the highest fertility rates in the rich world and, among rich nations, suffers from the highest infant mortality rate, thus this 3% is 3% of a very large number of American infants who die each year. Put another way, Rodriguez et al.’s paper finds that for babies conceived during the incumbency of a Republican president, some 3% fewer are likely to see their first birthday than are babies conceived during Democratic tenure. If you are concerned about the health of your potential future offspring then clearly, along with taking folic acid supplements, you should ensure you vote the right way. The authors of this research lag the presidential tenure factor by a year so that each president’s policy’s impacts might have enough time to have had an effect. However, it might equally be possible that there is an effect on pregnant mothers of even knowing that a majority of their fellow countrymen and women have chosen one side to rule over another. There are many possible paths that could result in the outcome found here. These range from the direct effect of spending cuts on health care, to a poorer mother possibly being more likely to self-medicate by drinking more alcohol if the she suddenly finds that the party in power label people like her welfare queens. Discerning the precise mechanism whereby a fetus in the womb and babies alive at any point during a Republican presidency become more likely to die in the first year of life is far harder than determining that these additional deaths occur. This leaves the authors of the paper suggesting a vague formula. They propose that their results suggest: ‘the political system is a component of the underlying mechanism generating health inequality in the United States’. They are right, but we need to know more in future about both how this happens and why Republicans value young lives less than Democrats. And it is not just infants that are affected and undervalued. They may simply be the most immediately susceptible to present policy. Infants have no store of resilience from having benefited from living through better, earlier times. It was reported that infant mortality rates in the USA were rising absolutely for the first time since at least the 1950s in 2005, during the Bush administration’s tenure. It was in 2010 that the first overall fall in life expectancy for all of the USA was reported. Those falls in US life expectancy had occurred 2 years earlier, at the end of the Bush era in 2008. By 2013, life expectancy falls were being reported from more detailed analysis of that earlier period for some groups of women in the USA: poor women, Black women and now also poorer White women, and especially for women in the southern states. As yet the full