Martin Robbins seizes the occasion of a birth in the Windsor family to point out what luck that baby has to be born with such good odds.
[T]hings are getting better. The small wrinkly proto-Royal that just emerged from the national womb will have thrice the chance of surviving that her father and I did, just through the privilege of being born in 2015. But if that makes you feel all warm and complacent, there are a couple of big problems with this story.
While it’s true that things are getting better, they’re still not good enough. Our babies are considerably more likely to die than those born in countries like Spain, Italy, France or basically any other European nation you can think of. By 2010, we’d just about caught up with Japan… in 1985.