When we think about death, we normally think about the elderly, or at least the aging. But the deaths of the young, while rare, are particularly tragic. As a new Population Bulletin (from the Population Reference Bureau, or PRB) shows, these deaths are quite a bit higher in the U.S. than they are in other developed countries.
This chart from the report summarizes the overall picture. Note that the Y axis depicts the chance of dying at any point during the age range in question—so infant mortality is the chance of dying in one year, while the other bins are the chance of dying in four or five years. In any one of these countries, then, infancy is by far the riskiest time to be alive.
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies