Guest Columnist Sheila Gardner: Nevada's dubious distinction: Worst state to be born in

Sunday, March 10, 2002 | 9:09 a.m.

Sheila Gardner is a contributor to Writers on the Range. She is night desk editor of the Nevada Appeal in Carson City.

If there's a negative health statistic floating out there, you can bet Nevada is attached to it: alcoholism, teen pregnancy, compulsive gambling, suicide, smoking, we've got it all.

This February we were able to add "one of the 10 worst states to be born in." I have a tough time diagramming that phrase, much less explaining to my daughter why I hadn't just waddled over the state line to give birth to her in a more respectable place, like Utah or California.

Luckily, her birth predates by 10 years the decade recently examined, but some of my best friends are mothers who gave birth to Nevada babies between 1990 and 1999. And fine babies they are.

"One of the worst states to be born in." What a welcome for babies born today at Carson-Tahoe Hospital or St. Mary's or Washoe Medical Center. Some of us are proud of our children's status as "native Nevadans." Are we wrong?

The study called "The Right Start" was prepared by the research firm, Child Trends and Kids Count. It says Nevada trails only Arizona, the District of Columbia and New Mexico for the percentage of women failing to seek prenatal care.

We are improving. In 1990, 8 percent of the women who gave birth to Nevada's 21,599 newborns didn't seek prenatal care. In 1999, though we had more babies -- 29,362 -- the number of mothers not seeking prenatal care had dropped to 7 percent.

The study ranks the states in eight categories. Perhaps surprisingly, Nevada does best -- and that not very well -- in the category of the percentage of total births to mothers who smoke. The mothers in 17 states smoked more than Nevada mothers did in 1999.

Some of the measurements tracked, such as the lack of timely prenatal care and the percentage of mothers who smoked during pregnancy, reflect conditions before birth that can affect the health of an infant.

Other conditions, such as low birth-weight and pre-term births, reflect a baby's health status at the time of birth. Premature babies lag developmentally, while very low-weight babies have a tough time learning for many years. Some characteristics of the mother -- marital status, age and education -- are also likely to be related to conditions that place children at risk. For example, the poverty rate for children born to an unmarried, teenage, high school dropout -- 79 percent -- is 10 times that of children born to a married women over age 20 who finished high school.

But don't take my word for it; log onto www.kidscount.org and see how your baby's circumstances stack up against the nation's newborns.

Let's say you're planning for a fat, full-term baby. Head for Oregon, which comes in No. 1 for healthy babies born not too early and No. 3 for completed weeks of pregnancy. Would you like a married, nonsmoking mother? Utah is your destination since it's No. 1 in the percentage of mothers who are married at birth and No. 5 for nonsmoking mothers.

California is mixed, hovering around the national average in all categories except in percentage of births to mothers with less than 12 years of education. There, California ranks a dubious No. 1 -- certainly worse than Nevada. In fact, a big chunk of the West fails when it comes to education of moms-to-be, with Arizona ranking 49th and Texas 51st.

I don't have any solutions for Nevada babies, but I do have a question. What are the statistics for Nevada's fathers? Don't they exert any influence on the children they helped make possible?

Calling Nevada one of the 10 worst states to begin existence is grim. And now that President Bush has opened wide the doors to our country's new nuclear-waste dump, "worst state to be born in" might not be too far from the truth. This time, though, the reasons have nothing to do with education, low birth weight and prenatal care. It has to do with dumping the nation's waste on one place, a brutal exercise in power.

That's not fair to any of Nevada's babies -- past, present and future.