Mississippi’s Infant Mortality Rate Has Experts Sounding the Alarm as More Babies Die Each Year

It's every parent's worse nightmare, but for parents and caregivers in Mississippi, it's something that happens far too often: the loss of a child. According to statistics provided by the state's Department of Health, Mississippi's infant mortality rate has reached record heights over the years, and the number of children who die before every reaching their first birthday has only continued to climb.

In fact, the state has now seen the highest number of infant deaths in a decade.

This has caused officials and advocates to sound the alarm so that they can determine what causes Mississippi babies to die at a rate that is nearly double the national average, causing heartbreak and devastation for entirely too many people in The Magnolia State.

Trigger warning: This article does contain information about the loss of a child, and it may be hard for some people to read.

Numbers provided by the Mississippi Department of Health (DOH) show that for every 1,000 live births in the state, 9.7 babies will die before they turn one. These numbers were provided as of 2024, according to CBS News, and they show that more than 3,500 babies have died since 2014, creating a new record for the state.

According to CBS News, the DOH has been able to determine the root causes of all of these deaths, and there are more than a few things at play here.

First, a number of babies are lost to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), a condition that seems to take babies without warning and without much explanation.

Additionally, many babies die because of congenital malformations, which means that their death was related to something that happened during development in utero. A number of babies are also lost each year due to low birthweight and premature birth.

CBS News goes on to report that of those infant deaths, Black infants are more likely to die than their white counterparts, highlighting the disparity between the groups.

Additionally, Time magazine reports that Mississippi has received an F rating from the March of Dimes, due to the high infant mortality rate and the fact that the state has the highest rate of preterm births in the country.

This sad news has prompted the state to declare a public health emergency in the hope that they can start to turn things around. At the top of the list of things that will need to be fixed are access to better and more frequent healthcare options for both mothers and new babies, as well as improving the overall physical health of mothers during pregnancy.

Whether that will be something that is easy to accomplish remains to be seen. With rural healthcare access being heavily impacted by the Trump administration's so-called Big Beautiful Bill, there's a chance that maternal healthcare access will actually decline in the coming years, putting Mississippi on the fast track to see those infant mortality rates increase over the next ten years, serving up even more devastation for families in the state.