Retroactive Abortions
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Headline is:
Black newborns 3 times more likely to die when looked after by white doctors
But the piece says:
The mortality rate of black newborns shrunk by between 39% and 58% when black physicians took charge of the birth, according to the research,
(And even that is unlikely to be true, I’d love to see their data)
The piece does say this:
When cared for by white physicians, black newborns were about three times more likely to die in the hospital than white newborns, the researchers found.
But that bolded part is not what’s implied by the headline
Also they don’t bother mentioning the ratio when seen by black physicians. The racial disparity in mortality rates is not primarily a function of physician care of newborns. And whatever component of it is traceable to physician care, almost certainly isn’t primarily driven by race of the physician.
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The whole article is a cherry-picked rage builder. There are no real statistics presented. The only line in that article that is relevant is this:
"Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns,"
OK, so it manifests with complicated cases, which implies that specialists become involved. So how do we count how many physicians are on a case? Nowhere to be found. How many specialists and what is the ratio of whaite to black specialists? How many hospitalists versus obstetricians?
How many complicated cases in black births versus white births?
This article is utter garbage and any physician should be offended. The clearly crafted implication is that white physicians don't care about black infants.
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It leverages two flawed heuristics surrounding race that are quite prevalent.
- Disparities=discrimination as the null hypothesis
and the more subtle one:
- Discrimination occurs at the point where the disparity is measured
#2 does a lot of mischief in the discussion around policing. And hiring and education. And here too.
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I also find it very hard to believe that white doctors care less about black babies.
However, we have to distinguish two things here:
- The accuracy of the CNN report relative to the scientific paper
- The accuracy of the scientific paper.
Regarding 1), my impression is that while they exaggerate some numbers (tripled vs doubled), it seems to be a mostly fair summary of the scientific paper.
So, the thing we really should look at is the paper (which can easily be retrieved via scihub).
In particular, I wonder
- is data upon which the paper is based "legit"?
- is their statistical analysis correct?
If the answer to both is "yes", then it would be interesting to speculate on possible causes for the disparity.
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@Klaus said in Retroactive Abortions:
I also find it very hard to believe that white doctors care less about black babies.
However, we have to distinguish two things here:
- The accuracy of the CNN report relative to the scientific paper
- The accuracy of the scientific paper.
Regarding 1), my impression is that while they exaggerate some numbers (tripled vs doubled), it seems to be a mostly fair summary of the scientific paper.
CNN leaves out a significant finding that the mother’s mortality is not affected by black vs. white doctor. Interesting finding relative to the other political hot button of maternal mortality and race.
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Seen on Twitter. Incendiary but surely a risk.
Let's not lose the forest for the trees on the "white docs kill black babies" paper. The big picture is that 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘬𝘦𝘥 it will be used by every med school in the country to justify admitting people who flunked organic chemistry.
