we should address the societal issues that cause the children of black mothers to have a higher mortality rate. This is surely not a controversial statement. But what causes should we address, and how should we measure our progress? For better or for worse, many advocates for racial justice have assumed birth weight as an intermediate step in the chain Race → Birth Weight → Mortality. Not only that, they have taken birth weight as a proxy for infant mortality, assuming that improvements in the one will automatically lead to improvements in the other.
