Fighting A Rising Infant Mortality Rate

One Private Group Is Helping Two Mississippi Counties Buck The Trend

(CBS)  Barb Williams has dropped in on Kawiya Davis once or twice a week since Kawiya's son was born three months ago.

Kawiya dropped out of seventh grade to have her baby. She plans to go back, but right now she's learning other things from Barb.

"How to burp and stuff," said Kawiya Davis. "They told us not to lay them on a pillow on their stomach."

Kawiya and baby Deqarius live with five more family members in a trailer in Rolling Fork, the heart of the Delta.

"They come here and helped out because this is my first child," said Kawaya.

She needed it, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason. The Davis family's monthly income is $623, and Kawiya was cut off Medicaid for a while after Deqarius was born.

Williams is one of four home visitors from the Cary Christian Center in Cary, Mississippi, whose mission is to help pregnant women and new mothers in Sharkey and Issaquena counties. For 18 years the center has been busing women to the only prenatal classes for miles around.

In 2005, when Mississippi's infant mortality rate leapt to more than 11 per thousand, and the black population was losing babies at 17 per thousand, none died in Sharkey or Issaquena counties.

From 1991 to 2004, Sharkey County's black infant death rate was around 5 per thousand, beating the overall national average of about 7 per thousand.

Mississippi is federally designated as medically underserved, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Delta, where, as people here say, only the soil is rich.

Dr. Christina Glick says the Cary Center is saving Mississippi lives and money by providing preventive health care.

"Continual, consistent care provided by lay visitors who give education, support, provide transportation, provide medicine," said Glick.

Lydia Berry starts with the basics: the anatomy of pregnancy, symptoms, how to take care of yourself. And a little of the Good Book.

CBS News attended one clas full of pregnat women. All were teenagers, none were married, none were in school and none were employed.

The Cary Center is battling is a rural culture in which teen pregnancy and a hardscrabble life are the norm.

Still, word has spread. Seventeen-year-old Shondrinique Lindsey's friends told her the center would teach her things she wants to know.

"How to be a good parent when I grow up," said Lindsey. "How to take care of my baby on my own."

But not alone. The home visitors are available 24/7. They are from the Delta, and they share this place's past and future.

Williams, who remembers her mother picking cotton for a living, was herself a teenage mom.

The only thing the Cary Center withholds is judgment. They preach abstinence, but then care for a clientele that is clearly not listening.

"The bottom line to this ministry is definitely to bring people to the Lord," said Caroline Newhoff, a coordinator of Parent Child Ministry. "I don't know always how successful I've been."

Rather, Caroline Newhoff's success is evident in the living babies of Sharkey County, some of whom are now coming back with babies of their own.

Kawiya's mom Vicky went to the Cary Center 18 years ago with her firstborn.

"People come out and talk to you about your baby and let you know you ain't alone," said Vicky Davis.

The Cary Center says one key to its success in the areas it serves is that the young women there are particularly receptive to outside advice and counsel.

[iowadad1]

Nice story - the creation of a third generation of people who depend on the taxpayers for their existance.

Next time CBS does a story on this type of topic they need to find the kid's father and bring him in on the story. It is time these guys bear the burden of paying for their kids and stop dumping the cost on the taxpayers.

Also, who knows, perhaps a rapist could be found in this case.

[hermit22]

oh ya, and "IF SHE IS NOT YOUR WIFE, LEAVE HER ALONE!"

drag out the statutory rape laws,
dust them off and USE them.

[hermit22]

"contraceptives" is not the answer.

QUIT CATTING AROUND before you are MARRIED

is the answer!

[jolsonbear]

Ok, so this group has helped to decrease the number of infant deaths....Good. Who will teach the kids how to use contraceptives?

[hermit22]

"dropped out of seventh grade to have her baby".... this CHILD is a victum of statutory RAPE and she has probably never ever heard the word.

for every illigitimate baby there should be some stupid stud locked up in the jail. they should KEEP him there until that baby is 25 years old.the jail needs to be right next door to the slum the kid grows up in, so they can get a clue!

and that religious lady had better come up with some backbone and some JUDGEMENT. all this crazy "tollerance" of evil....is where victims of this EVIL are expected to suffer in silence....because they are expected to "not be judgemental". that is twisted and perverse. it is MUCH better to say! "KNOCK IT OFF!" "do the crime, do the time"....

"ABANDONMENT of a mother and baby" is a crime!
statutory rape is an evil crime.

jail shouldn't be free board and room, it needs to be where these stud guys don't eat unless they grow their own garden! IN THE JAIL yard!

The USA as a whole has a much higher infant mortality rate than other industrial nations - especially those with national health care.

Preventive medicine's value can be seen in the 12-yr old Maryland boy who died this year after infection from an abscessed tooth spread to his brain: few dentists accept Medicaid and it the paltry payments. After the boy became emergency ward material, $250,000 was spent in a vain attempt to save his life.