By Richard Morin
Thursday, March 23, 2006; Page A02
The ugly wave of anti-Arab feelings immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, may have been responsible for a sharp increase in the incidence of premature and low-birth-weight babies born to women of Arab descent in the United States in the months that followed the terrorist attacks.
The evidence is circumstantial but compelling, epidemiologist Diane S. Lauderdale of the University of Chicago says in the latest issue of Demography.
Other researchers studying black women previously have found that stress caused by discrimination boosted production of certain hormones to levels harmful to a developing fetus. To find out whether anti-Arab feelings after 9/11 produced a similar effect in expectant Arab or Arab American mothers, Lauderdale turned to birth records collected from 2000 to 2002 in California, where reported hate crimes tripled after the terrorist strikes, mostly because of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents.
Lauderdale identified more than 15,000 mothers with distinctive Arab last names. She found that those women who gave birth six months after 9/11 were 34 percent more likely have a low-birth-weight baby than those who gave birth in the same six-month period a year earlier. Post-9/11 babies also were 50 percent more likely to be born prematurely.
She also found that babies with distinctively Arab first names as well as last names -- suggesting that their parents were either more recent arrivals or less assimilated -- were twice as likely to be underweight after 9/11.
Significantly, there was no change in the rate of either premature births or low-birth-weight babies among other women during the same time periods.
That's a fascinating article - I'd love to see a study like that done here in Australia now that there is so much anti-Muslim sentiment coming from our own government (sickening, I know), because I don't doubt it is affecting these people's quality of life!
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I call Heaven and earth to witness that whether one be Jew or gentile, man or woman, only according to their good deeds does the Divine Spirit rest upon them. -Midrash
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Only yesterday, I heard on the radio about a study looking into infant mortality, comparing different regions of the UK. Apparently, babies born in central Birmingham have the highest mortality rate - counting babies born breathing from 22 weeks onwards - upto 8 times higher than in some leafy suburb of Surrey. I've lived and worked in central Birmingham and it has an extremely high muslim population, and the study believes the government should set up a commission to find out the whys. This is despite the fact Birmingham has excellent obstetric facilities, freely available to all (and bearing in mind, everyone in the UK has free at the point of use health care - immigrant population included). This wasn't related to 7th July over here, or anything political and I think the study was commissioned by a major charity.
What this may mean is, that any population who feels 'under siege', living in an hostile environment, may be more prone to these problems, even in societies where excellent health care costs nothing.
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Babies, Bigotry, and 9/11 
