The Repeat Offenders: States That Failed Newborns in Every Decade Since 1980
States are ranked on four measures of birth safety: infant mortality, low birthweight, maternal mortality and cesarean delivery. Within each period, every state is ranked against all others on each measure, and those ranks are averaged to give the state a single finishing position for that period. The average finishing position shown here is the mean of a state's finishing positions across the periods it qualified for. The span covers four decades of federal birth data, 1980 to 2024, with the 2020s covering 2020 to 2024. Worst metric is the measure on which a state ranks poorest against the rest of the country over the full span; worst decade is the period in which it finished highest on the combined ranking.