US infant death rates for 1960 to 1980 declined most quickly

US infant death rates for 1960 to 1980 declined most quickly in (1) Demeclocycline HCl 1970 to 1973 in states that legalized abortion in 1970 especially for infants in the lowest 3 income quintiles (annual percentage change?=??11. were affected by 1960s and 1970s policies that expanded access to abortion.3-8 Consistent with a reproductive justice framework 9 10 we hypothesized that between 1960 and 1980 the steepest annual percentage declines in the infant death rate would occur among US states that legalized abortion in 1970 relative to states that decreased restrictions or kept abortion strictly illegal Demeclocycline HCl prior to national legalization of abortion in 1973 11 with the largest changes for infants born in low-income counties. A corollary was that state abortion law status would be less associated with mid- to late-1960s declines in infant mortality attributed by previous research6 12 to beneficial economic and social changes spurred by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and by the War on Poverty 20 21 especially among low-income infants both Black and White. METHODS We computed the infant death rate ([deaths?MYLK regression function and Demeclocycline HCl enables estimation of both the annual percentage change (APC) in rates and the inflection points where the slope of the APC significantly changes ((grant to N. Krieger and to X. Lin). Note. The National Institutes of Health had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection management analysis and interpretation of the data; and preparation review or approval of the article; and Demeclocycline HCl decision to submit the article for publication. Human Participant Protection Because our analyses are based solely on publicly available de-identified preexisting coded data aggregated to the US county level Demeclocycline HCl our study was exempted from institutional review board review by the Harvard School of Public Health human subjects.