I’m sipping my morning coffee and glancing at the Sunday New York Times when my 8-year old son asks “What is stillborn?”. I choke on my coffee a bit and open my eyes wider to see a photo of several women in Tanzania burying a tiny stillborn baby on the front page of the paper. After a quick answer that doesn’t invite much discussion I flip the paper over so that the distressing photo is no longer in view. Only to see another photo — this one of a college student feeding a lamb with a bottle in upstate New York — that makes the first photo even more depressing. Apparently in the U.S. we have a surfeit of college educated young people to care for newborn lambs, while in Tanzania (and in distressingly many other places throughout the developing world) mothers and their babies die because there are too few people with the requisite skills to care for them.
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