This past Sunday we spent the afternoon with our good friends the Somasis.

From an AP article on MSNBC.com:

America may be the world's superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia.

Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia's rate is 6 per 1,000.

"We are the wealthiest country in the world, but there are still pockets of our population who are not getting the health care they need," said Mary Beth Powers, a reproductive health adviser for the U.S.-based Save the Children, which compiled the rankings based on health data from countries and agencies worldwide.

The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world...

In the analysis of global infant mortality, Japan had the lowest newborn death rate, 1.8 per 1,000 and four countries tied for second place with 2 per 1,000 — the Czech Republic, Finland, Iceland and Norway.

Still, it's the impoverished nations that feel the full brunt of infant mortality, since they account for 99 percent of the 4 million annual deaths of babies in their first month. Only about 16,000 of those are in the United States, according to Save the Children.

The highest rates globally were in Africa and South Asia. With a newborn death rate of 65 out of 1,000 live births, Liberia ranked the worst.

The Daily Kos asks the provocative question: Do "Christian Nations" Let Their Newborns Die?:

Somehow I sense this issue will not get the traction the overheated fetus debate gets with the fundamentalist crowd. There's just something not quite as alluring about discussing health care provisions for pregnant moms and their offspring compared with telling your neighbor what to do with her womb...

So are we to expect Falwell, Robertson and Dobson to froth up the political waters on behalf of single-payer health insurance and longer paid leaves from the workplace? I'm not holding my breath.

The well-being of mothers fares poorly as well, according to the report, with the U.S. tied for last place among industrial nations on indicators such as "mortality risks and contraception use."

Perhaps it's time for Mullah Dobson to live up to his organization's name and focus on the family - which as he endlessly wants to remind us, means state intervention in the mother-child reproduction wars. It's hard to see the logic in how a soul that's stainless when it's enwombed does not deserve the best resources of a wealthy nation to make sure the physical body that accompanies it into life is healthy.

Right on.

Andrew Sullivan's essay on "Christianism" is getting quite a bit of mileage, as it should. I think it's a good one. He highlights a variety of perspectives that are likely uncomfortable with the "religious right" and draws a parallel between Muslim/Islamist and Christian/Christianist. A few excerpts:

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else...

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?...

I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

Sullivan's viewpoint is complementary to that of Gary Wills (see earlier blog entry here), though Sullivan's is, I think, more satisfying as it seems to come from a sincere believer while Wills' has more of a taste of a professor's academic smugness.

There's a follow-up to the Christianist essay here.

And Hugh Hewitt takes offense here.